Exactly what caused it to cost this much. I figure its not the soldiers pay because 150k soldiers is going to run about 6 billion tops (assuming a generic 40k to pay, house and feed each soldier) a year. I thought we already owned all the military equiptment we used including the transports we used to transfer it to iraq. Where did most of the costs come from.
Well, some of the money is going to contractors, whose staff cost a lot more to pay than regular soldiers, and some would be going on equipment that gets used up in Iraq (e.g. bullets and bombs).
Bullets and bombs do eat up a lot of money. Consider also that you have to provide three meals a day for those 150,000 soldiers, medical supplies, massive amounts of fuel for everything from tanks to generators to airplanes and helicopters, huge amounts of steel and concrete for barriers, tens of thousands of tents and and other temporary housing, extra flak jackets and armor, millions of spare parts for tens of thousands of vehicles and aircraft and ships of all sorts, etc, etc, etc. Waging a war requires a whole lot of crap.
Also there are contractors over there making 10000 a month and more to do the same job as the army for more pay. War is big business.
Well, the war in Iraq was has not cost $200 billion. Congress has appropriated $100.1 billion for military operations for Iraq so far, plus another $25 billion that will be approved this week. (Part of the confusaion arises in that the $87 billion funding bill passed last fall is often incorrectly cited as being for Iraq, when it was actually for Iraq, Afghanistan, and other military operations, as well as reconstruction funding.)
There are a number of reasons that the operations cost so much. Pay is only an issue for reservists (active military get paid whether they are in Iraq or in Michigan), but there’s an awful lot of reservists in Iraq, and an awful lot of health care expenses, too.
Flying supplies in and out costs a terrible amount of money, and it cost a ton (can’t find right at the moment) to move to many troops into the theater in the first place, even with prepositioned equipment.
Fuel, ammunition, and other expendables cost a lot, because we go through a lot of them. There is also a cost that has not yet been addressed that is going to be very, very expensive: resetting the force, that is, getting them back home and fixing their equipment.
Here is a prospective analysis of the cost of the war that has been reasonably accurate, given the extreme uncertainties when it was written. It goes into much more detail than I did, and it is readable.
There has also been just over $24 billion dedicated for reconstruction. Of the $18.4 billion of these funds approved last fall, less than $400 million has actually been spent.
I think that most of the costs are coming from the extraction of oil in Iraq. It is also well known that Halliburton isn’t delivering the food to the troops like it is getting paid for. The one thing that surprised me the most though is that Bush is spending 1 million dollars building a Suddam Hussein museum. Who wants to go see that.
Can I get a cite on this?
From Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11:
DR. SAM KUBBA: I’ve been getting complaints from Iraqi firms and from American firms, uh, that the lack of transparency, the corruption… I think the profits that American companies are making, the major, the main companies, uh, are so overwhelming. I mean, like when you have a line item for a million dollars and you subcontract it out for fifty, or sixty, or seventy thousand dollars, that’s a huge profit. And it’s the American taxpayer that’s gonna pay for that.
And:
SOLDIER: It’s no secret, I mean, I make anywhere’s, I don’t know, between two and three thousand a month. A Halliburton employee out here drivin’ a bus can make all between eight and ten thousand a month. Explain that one to me. For forty hours a week… driving the same two-and-a-half mile route. Go figure. Where do you, where’s the justification in that?
From Senator Richard Durbin:
In the same press release:
$10,000 / mo is chicken feed. I have a friend that just went there as a contractor for $1000 a DAY. 4 mos work - $120k approx.
A relative works in an overseas embassy and he has lost staff going to Iraq that makes MORE than $1000 a day. They make in Iraq what they earn in a yr in 4 mos time where they are stationed now.
Wow…talk about inflation. I was using the Doha base guards in Kuwait for my example. They are civilian contractors, starting at 60000 year year, tax free, with regular raises up to 120000 a year. Why the army can’t use troops for this job is beyond me, but I think most of humanity is beyond me. The disgusting excesses of Haliburton are just another example. The money could be better spent.
Well, I’d like a cite for that, because I don’t find it believable.
The total net revenue for all the OPEC countries last year was just under $300 billion.
So how could Iraq pay the $200 billion cost of this war?
Iraq’s oil revenue last year was $9.6 billion. So even if they used 100% of it to pay for the war, it would take about 21 years to do so. (Assuming that their government could send all their oil money off to America to pay for the war, with none of it used to rebuild the country, and keep getting reelected for 21 years.)
Iraq’s highest production ever (in the years just before the invasion of Kuwait) was about double that, around $18-$20 billion. So if they could get back to that level (and assuming there was no sabatoge of the oilfields or pipelines), they could pay for the war in 10-11 years.
Some experts claim that if Iraq installed the latest technology and went all out to pump as much oil as fast as possible, that could be increased 2.5 to 3 times, up to $45-$60 billion. So they could pay the war cost in 4-5 years. (Assuming they didn’t use any of this money to pay for “installing the latest technology” and assuming that this glut of oil doesn’t cause the price to go down. These are questionable assumptions, I think)
I find it highly unlikely that Iraq will be able to pay for this war using its’ oil.
Above figures are from the US Dept. of Energy, from
here and Congressional Research Service here.
“Most of the costs?” Ha! There is indeed a lot of money coming out of the ground – about $8 billion so far in 2004 – but the bulk of this money is being used to pay the operating expenses of the Iraqi government, and so a lesser extent, for reconstruction projects.
And yes, it is true that US reconstruction money was requested to build a couple museums. The White House asked for $1 million for a “Memory Foundation,” to compile documents related to Saddam’s atrocities. In a supreme bit of irony, the White House also asked for: “Abu Gharaib Memorial: We are working to establish a memorial and museum at Abu Gharaib with local Iraqi NGO participation. Desire to put out an RFP 9/03. Anticipated cost of memorial: $0.5 million.”
Well, how about that? :smack:
rjung wrote
HAHAHAHA
That’s a good one.
We need both soldiers and drivers? Would he rather more reservists were called up to drive trucks?
No…I think he would rather have equal pay for equal work. Since his salary is not likely to be bumped up, the contractor truck driver probably needs a pay-cut. Obvious.
But no civilian will do it for that pay. Call up the reserves…
No two ways about it: military service is a sacrifice.
Yep. Well no American citizen would do it for that kind of pay. But last I heard, there were millions of unemployed Iraqis who would happily do so, for far less pay. I’m sure they’d be happy to make similar pay to the soldiers. There is no need to have these contractors there, just beurocratic pork nonsense.
It just kind of stinks when they rub it in your face like that, which is what I think the soldier’s point was. Bad enough you are there risking your life for no good reason, but then they have to go and hire someone else to do the same thing for more pay and fewer hours, and its got to sting.
As well, the practices of civilian trucking contracters have raised some eyebrows.
I’m not sure that the use of the word, ‘pretext’ is entirely justified, there, because I’m not a logistics expert. I have a hard time getting my head around how drivers are valuated against cargoes, though.
Which goes some way toward answering the OP’s question.
Any administration waging a war has to balance the political costs of taxing the enlisted and reservists with contracting the work out and taxing the general population. And that’s a bit of a no-brainer, really. Yanking reservists out of their routines is going to be unpopular with a lot of people – and for most people, the cost of defense contracts in terms of their tax dollars is pretty abstract – and have the advantage of being viewed as a concrete economic benefit by some people.
There’s no incentive for KBR to employ Iraqis, though. The additional security concerns would be considerable, of course, and you can be relatively sure that American citizens are going to be on your side. Apart from that, their contract is on a “cost-plus” basis, which means that their operational costs are passed on directly to Uncle Sam. So why be penurious?
(Of course, war materiel ain’t exactly getting cheaper, either.)