Republicans on Capitol Hill are preparing to confront a staggering price tag for the war in the Middle East after closed-door briefings this week detailed the rapid consumption of expensive munitions and the lack of any firm deadline for the end of the military campaign.
Asked how much the Iran offensive would cost, House Appropriations Chair Tom Cole (R-Okla.) didn’t sugarcoat it.
“A lot,” he replied.
I get that tossing a missile that cost $1 million is a million gone.
What I wonder, when we see these costs are they just extra costs? Do they account for the costs of just having a military ready and waiting?
Put another way let’s say having a military hanging around and practicing costs $1000/day. They go to war. You still pay the military salaries but now you are using more bombs than you did in practice. The men/women and planes and what not are just there. Is the cost reported just the extra cost over what we normally spend if our military does nothing?
Remember…this is FQ and this is in NO WAY meant to justify or demean what is happening. There are other places for that.
Yes it is in addition to the usual cost of the military. While you are still paying for soldiers in the war you have the extra hazard pay. And you are using a lot of consumables such as munitions and fuel, destroyed aircraft and other equipment. There are massive logistics costs to move all kinds of materiel to the front. In peacetime maintenance is scheduled; now it has to be done on an emergency (expensive) basis.
Also, a lot of those costs effectively only exist in the field. Machinery stored in a building needs a lot less maintenance (much less fuel) than machinery actually being used in the field. And everything from getting new parts to actually doing the maintenance is going to be much cheaper, faster and easier in an established base in friendly territory than out in the field.
Doing things in the field is just inherently less efficient than doing them in some place that has all the needed supplies and infrastructure right there. Including all sorts of big, bulky equipment and facilities that aren’t practical to haul to the field.
The $891 million per day estimate was provided by the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Working off of Table 1 of the study gives the following breakdown:
Munitions: 83.6%
Combat losses and infrastructure damage: 9.7%
Operations and support costs: 5.3%
Other: 1.5%
Percentages provided by MfM, reworked off of raw numbers, ultimately derived from the Pentagon.
So yes, it’s mostly munitions.
All of this is extrapolated from the first 100 hours of operations. I’d expect the figures to evolve if the war goes on for, say, another month. Indeed munitions costs are expected to decline as the US shifts to lower cost missiles.
Surely, it depends on who’s saying it? I imagine that different sources use different methodology, and hence come up with different numbers for the same war.
Not in the same way. Outside of war, ships usually cruise at a slow, steady, fuel efficient way. Whereas in war, they suddenly are in a real hurry to get somewhere or get away from somewhere. Aircraft carriers, when launching, will usually run full speed ahead into the wind.
Similarly, planes during training or patrol will not usually fly at full throttle with the afterburner on.
Somewhat on-topic, but when a ship has been on duty for an unusually long time (such as the USS Gerald Ford carrier, which was deployed much longer than it was originally supposed to,) do Navy regulations let the crew then also take a correspondingly longer ship leave than normal? If so, that would also be an indirect cost.
Also occurs to me - do military get overtime? A pilot on call who maybe flies a cargo plane across the country once a week now suddenly is flying 12 hours a day non-stop for weeks shuttling supplies… any bump in pay?
Uniformed military do not get overtime. Hazardous duty pay is $225 a month and used to be paid out if as little as 1 day was spent in a hazard zone, now it’s pro-rated.
That said there’s a lot of stuff that’s contracted out now. A higher ops tempo means more overtime for all of the support contractors.
I wish. I worked so many hours on my submarine (with the sole limitation being that there are only 168 hours in a week) that I once calculated—while on watch, of course—that I was making less money per hour than the minimum wage I had received while working at McDonald’s in high school.