The U.S. is running up against a shortage of surveillance drones to conduct reconnaissance of the various battlefields where it is engaged. Right now, the theater where its combat troops are directly engaged is getting priority … as it most certainly should be.
On another front, the Syrian city of Kobani under attack and likely to fall. An outcome, as Kate Brannen of Foreign Policy reports, that:
… could have as much to do with resources as it does with the flaws of a strategy that, for now, is mostly reliant on airstrikes alone. That’s because U.S. Central Command, or Centcom, is balancing growing demands for intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) assets across Iraq and Syria with keeping an eye on Afghanistan, where the United States and NATO allies still have roughly 40,000 troops stationed.
And:
About half of Centcom’s ISR orbits are tied up in Afghanistan, with no big shift in resources since airstrikes began in Iraq in Aug. 8, the senior Defense Department official said without divulging the actual number of orbits.
This could change, however, since:
… the United States plans to draw down the number of troops in Afghanistan to just 9,800 by January.
