I can’t keep up with the level of corruption that is going on. The Washington Post reports on a Congressional Research Service report on the cost of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. It’s not just that the wars are costing “nearly as much money as the departments of Education, Justice and Homeland Security combined” or that “the $811 billion total for both wars would have far exceeded the inflation-adjusted $549 billion cost of the Vietnam War.” I mean, that’s staggering enough, right? But, it gets much worse.
Defense specialist Amy Belasco, the CRS study’s author, stressed that the price tag is only an estimate because the Defense Department has declined to break out the cost of Iraqi operations from the larger $435 billion cost of what the administration has labeled the global war on terrorism.
Bottom line? Congress can’t figure what the fuck the Pentagon is doing and how they are spending their money.
Congressional Research Service
The report goes on to outline a series of “key war cost questions” for Congress to pursue and “major unknowns” that CRS has not been able to answer: How much has Congress appropriated for each theater of war? How much has the Pentagon obligated for each mission per month? What will future costs be? How much will it cost to repair and replace equipment? And how can Congress receive accurate information on past and future troop levels?
Such questions are highly unusual for a congressional research agency report, congressional budget aides said yesterday, and they point to growing frustration in Congress with a Pentagon that has held war-cost information close to the vest.
The Pentagon is keeping war-profiteering and outright looting ‘close to the vest’. For example:
Of the total war spending, the CRS analysis found $4 billion that could not be tracked. It did identify $2.5 billion diverted from other spending authorizations in 2001 and 2002 to prepare for the invasion.
That’s a double whammy. Four billion dollars gone missing, another $2.5 illegally diverted. And there’s more.
War-related investment costs have more than tripled since 2003, from $7 billion to $24 billion, as money has been spent on armored vehicles, radios, sensors and night-vision goggles, as well as on equipment for reorganized Army and Marine Corps units.
“These reasons are not sufficient, however, to explain the level of increases,” the report states again.
They can’t explain where the money is going.
The report details how operations, maintenance and procurement costs have surged from $50 billion in 2004 to $88 billion this year, citing rising expenditures for body armor, oil and gasoline; equipment maintenance; and training and equipping Afghan and Iraqi security forces.
“These factors, however, are not enough to explain a 50-percent increase of over $20 billion in operating costs,” the report states.
Congress has spent more on this three year old war than they spent in inflation adjusted dollars on the ten-plus-year war in Vietnam. Let’s think about that. It’s not like Vietnam was cheap.
On December 31, 1967, the DoD announced that 864,000 tons of bombs had been dropped on North Vietnam during Rolling Thunder, compared to 653,000 tons dropped during the Korean War and 503,000 tons in the Pacific during World War II. In all, over both North and South Vietnam, 1.6 million tons had been dropped, exceeding the U.S. total in World War II of 1.5 million tons.
For fuck’s sake, what is costing so damn much? Instead of killing innocent Iraqis and occupying their dysfunctional country we could have doubled the budget for Education, Justice and Homeland Security. Or we could have had saved the money for our retirement instead of asking our kids to pay back the Chinese and the Saudis for our debt.
I don’t know how much more looting our country can take. This is disgusting. Rumsfeld still has a job. Unbelievable.
