Two claims have been made by ministers about British casualties in Afghanistan and whether there is a link between the numbers of soldiers killed and the numbers of helicopters deployed. Both are susceptible to checking - were the actual figures available.

CLAIM 1: In the House of Commons, the Prime Minister stated that the number of UK helicopters in  Afghanistan had risen by 60 per cent over the last two years. But percentage increases are meaningless unless we know the actual numbers involved, and how many troops they support. (And why a two year time-frame?)

Thanks to Michael Evans, Defence Editor of  The Times, we know today that the actual number of helicopters currently in Afghanistan is believed to be 23. In order of load capacity, they are: 10 Chinooks, 5 Sea Kings, and 8 Apaches - with 8 Chinooks and 8 Merlins due some time in 2010.
 
But is this enough? And does it justify Gordon Brown's claim of a 60 per cent increase over two years? When the increase in troop numbers is factored in, the actual increase in helicopters deployed is from 2.2 to 2.6 per 1,000 troops deployed - an increase of 18 per cent, not 60 per cent.
 
The real question is how the helicopter provision for UK troops in Afghanistan (1.1 Chinook-style and 1.4 other helicopters per 1,000 personnel) compares with (i) the professional military requirement, which is unlikely to be in the public domain, and (ii)  empirically - that is, by international standards.
 
Brigadier Ed Butler, a former UK commander of British forces in Afghanistan (now retired) hinted at an answer to the first question when giving evidence to the Commons Defence Committee on June 9 2009. He said that we had not got any more powerful in Afghanistan by raising troop levels because we had not put in "sufficiently and proportionately more enablers for the number of troops we have got on the ground because our our numbers of helicopters, information-gathering systems, have not grown at the same rate as our ground forces".
 
The consequence was that the Taliban were able to attack ground-based convoys with improvised explosive devices (IEDs). In Northern Ireland, where similar tactics had been used by the IRA, "at one stage we had over 70 helicopters servicing 10,000, 12,000, 15,000 troops" he said.
 
"You can do the maths yourselves of 8,000 troops and how many helicopters we have to service them. The problems, the geographics and the threat from the enemy, are the same as we faced 25 years ago when things started hotting up in Northern Ireland." The maths show that provision of helicopters in Afghanistan is about half the lowest figure - 4.7 per 1,000 - Brigadier Butler quoted for Northern Ireland.
 
A second approach would be to compare the UK helicopter provision per 1,000 troops with that of the other contingents, such as those from Canada and the US. 
 
Some 120 additional helicopters appear to have been brought to Afghanistan with the recent US  deployment of some 22,000 extra troops, not all of them to Helmand. On the face of it, this additional provision of 5.6 helicopters per 1,000 deployed appears distinctly more generous than UK’s – perhaps because other nations’ other ranks as well as their generals depend  on the American pool. Canadian forces seem also to have increased their air cover in 2009.
 
Of course, military men such Colonel Clive Fairweather CBE, formerly in the SAS, have rightly pointed out to me that helicopters’ use varies by functionality, time of day and season; and that helicopters such as the Apache are essentially gunships that carry little except crew and ordinance. Thus, separate accounting really does have to be done by type of helicopter.
 
But one of the conclusions of today's report on helicopter capability by the Commons Defence Select Committee is worth recording. The committee says:  
 

"We are concerned that operational commanders in the field today are unable to undertake potentially valuable operations because of the lack of helicopters for transportation around the theatre of operations.We are also concerned that operational commanders find they have to use ground transport, when helicopter lift would be preferred, both for the outcome and for the protection of our forces."

 
CLAIM 2: No UK troops have died in Afghanistan for want of helicopter transport. For this claim to be substantiated, all fatal incidents involving both ground transport and an IED would have to have been reviewed to establish if troop movement by road would have the preferred military option, or the default for want of a helicopter.
 
Reporting of fatal IED incidents on www.icasualties.org does not routinely cite whether a vehicle was involved in the incident or not - the UK’s recent five fatalities in an IED incident were on foot.
 
Systematic review of narrative verdicts from inquests into UK military fatalities in Afghanistan is another means by which to substantiate the Prime Minister’s claim. Few fatalities will have been occasioned by delay in evacuating injured personnel from a theatre of operations because of the high priority that the British Army and medical teams give to speedy evacuation of casualties.