The Cost of Exiting a War

An inability to avoid the sequester has called the government to think long and hard about how to reduce spending in a number of areas.

One of these is defense spending. Of course, wars are expensive to get into, but leaving a war-scene certainly isn't cheap either...

According to the Raw Story, the cost to leave Afghanistan—moving equipment and vehicles and taking down bases—will run at around $6 billion.

The U.S. is determined to pack up and remove all evidence of the war, in direct contrast to the Soviets, who left behind ghosts of their invasions in the form of old weapons and vehicles, as the Raw Story indicates.

But it's going to take a lot more than just driving those tanks out of the country.

The biggest problem the U.S. military faces is that Afghanistan is land-locked—and not by any nations friendly to the U.S. Of course, some equipment can be moved by roads, but a large number of things—particularly sensitive equipment—will have to be flown out.

And even more important is the looming deadline: 2014. The U.S. has to dispose of nearly 100,000 shipping containers and 28,000 vehicles. And the mine-resistant ambush-protected vehicles (MRAPs) must be washed down two or three times before they can be put onto planes, which is how most will be removed.

The problem is, only four of these MRAPs fit onto one plane, and the planes will only take them as far as Kuwait. After that, they must go on ships, Raw Story reports. Which means just about the same amount of equipment is required just to remove the equipment.

There are very few roads out of Afghanistan that the U.S. military can use. Pakistani roads and roads through the north are options, but neither are guaranteed to be secure.

Of course, this $6 billion is nothing compared to the roughly $557 billion cited by Bloomberg as the overall cost of the war. And over time, it will allow defense spending to be refocused domestically.

But it's a high cost for simply coming back home. And Colonel Mark Paget, a commander in Afghanistan, has found a number of unusual things that pushed the cost up—things that many might consider highly wasteful.

From Raw Story:

Paget recently opened a shipping container and found hundreds of easels inside, ordered at the peak of Obama’s surge for commanders in small outposts, keen to map out their offensives against the Taliban on whiteboards balanced on the wooden stands. “Excess easels, there were easels everywhere,” he said, shaking his head. “I will stand by that I have seen a container full of easels.”

And there are roughly 100,000 similar shipping containers to sort through. The fact that precious funds and resources are spent to find containers of things like easels is unsettling, to say the least.