Helium is the new gold in Afghanistan with lots of tethered balloons needing refilling (and emptying of lead!) every fortnight or so.
Anyway we discussed this last year at
http://www.pprune.org/military-aircr...istan-isr.html
Airships are 'snake oil' that get invested in every 10-20years and find they need too much infrastructure and can't deal with medium level winds. I await the cancellation of the program when they (re) discover this.
LJ