If you think the maniacal military supplemental budgets will end the day the retrograde order is given you are sorely mistaken. The money we’ve spent and the beginning of the end will get much more expensive.
Everyday we stay here we drain our already burdened treasury of much needed capital. Let’s go over some general numbers since I can’t give specifics, but you may be able to get them through a FOIA request, but I won’t give them here due to OPSEC violations. I did a few calculations and generally, in Iraq alone, we are spending a few billion dollars on the acquisition, storage, and transportation of fuel per month. This cost could be lowered but almost all of the transportation and storage is done by contractors because the soldier’s you paid to do the job are either doing something that you, the taxpayer, didn’t pay for them to get trained to do, or are resting from a rotation that is 12 months or less behind with the next 12 months or less in front of them. These contracts are generally expensive, especially in places like Iraq. The only problem is we don’t have enough soldiers and enough of the proper equipment to do the job ourselves without (LOG)istical (C)ivilian (A)ugmentation (P)rograms, generally called LOGCAP. Every day we spend here the knife goes in a little deeper.
At the beginning of the war funds were opened up for soldiers to buy equipment for their units that was necessary for force protection in an counterinsurgency fight that we were not expecting, or prepared to fight. We have mountains of this equipment in Iraq dubbed by the military the "mountains of metal" and unfortunately we have not been good stewards of your tax dollars. We are gradually sorting through the mountains and redistributing, repairing, or even destroying the equipment. We’ve found everything from containers of ammunition to boxes of police tazers. Millions upon millions of dollars equipment, parts, and pieces that were either never or rarely used then packed in a container for us to find later as we clean out these FOBs.
These mountains of metal are the reason retrograde must start now. Even if we wanted to pull out now, we couldn’t. Think one month per FOB with oven a dozen large FOBs and that’s with 24 hours a day 7 days a week sorting, packing, and transporting. My slightly educated guess is that we can’t be out of Iraq any sooner than over a year from when we get the order. While we can prepare as much as possible until the order comes to start the work we won’t know what we’re getting into. And you might want to plan on adding to that 12 billion a month another 500 million at least to get contract augmentation to facilitate the retrograde of all of this material. Not to mention the surge in soldiers that will be needed to secure the supply routes, unless we contract more of those jobs. While the number of "troops" in Iraq has decreased, they are now outnumbered by contractors, not all armed with 150,000 contractors (40,000 armed) and few thousand less soldiers currently in Iraq.
Here is the kicker. We have to use contracted transportation assets, at the least because the military logistics transportation fleet is floundering as pointed out in an OP-ED by GEN (Ret.)Wesley Clark in the New York Times on 16NOV2008 (sorry link won't work), and seen by us Logistics personnel on the ground everyday Right now the immediate futures of the base of our transportation fleet aren’t boding well. If they go bankrupt we will certainly have a problem getting parts for our trucks, as if that’s not enough of a problem already. When we wait sometimes up to 100 days for a part because the vehicles we’re using, while armored, are obsolete and not being used by the military outside of Iraq. This doesn’t only affect the war fighter in theater, but begins to affect them when they arrive in theater without training on the equipment they will have to use. There are not enough of them to complete the mission and provide complete training sets. The military has gotten a little creative in this respect.
Bottom line if you think the spending surge is over once President-Elect Barack Obama signs the retrograde order. Be prepared because it is only the beginning of a surge in spending the military will need just to get out of Iraq. Allow me to mention the mid-range projection of $13,000,000,000 (per year of fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan plus two years after from the CBO) for a total of the military will need to reset its equipment due to high OPTEMPO and Delayed Desert Deterioration (DDD) from non-stop use in the desert. So, if we get out 2010, which is the earliest, that’s 9 years + 2 years after or 11x$13,000,000,000= $143,000,000,000.
Congressional Budget Office Report In Detail
We’re talking everything from body armor, trucks, helicopters, to night vision devices. While this task has already started it’s only drips and drops compared to the tsunami of broken equipment that will follow troops back to the shores of the United States from the mountains of metal at FOBs in Iraq, requiring more contractor personnel to repair and return to the military. I put the zeroes and dollar signs in there on purpose. This does not include Stars Wars Defense, RandD, and Future Combat Systems (FCS) integration into unit structure.
In the end the taxpayers must be prepared to get over the sticker shock if they plan on having a force capable of defending their country, this is just the equipment. What about the people? How much will it cost to take care of the Soldiers and Marines suffering from PTSD and hosts of other mental and physical problems already haunting those, like me, who have done multiple extended tours? That price tag has yet to be seen or accurately estimated.