More On The Cost Of War
by Vince Daliessio
When we last wrote about the cost of the Iraq War, we showed you a rather disturbing counter, showing approximately $156 Billion, give or take, with the average rate of spending about $2000 per SECOND.
Why so costly? From a fan website about the F-15E Strike Eagle, the cost of ONE AG-130 Air-To-Ground Missile;
Unit Cost: Approximately US$ 884,000 (Production)
Inventory: Classified
Imagine. It costs well over a million dollars to destroy one building or aircraft in Iraq, counting fuel, transportation, and "delivery" costs.
Wilson Goode demonstrated in 1985 that it could be done much cheaper than that;
So tell me again - why does this stuff cost so much? And does anyone think there might be influential people with powerful motivations to use it as much as possible?
Comments
Hence my last sentence. Clearly, the people in the military like their deadly toys, and it's their job to kill people and destroy property. After all, it's what government does best, in fact, really, the only thing it does well. This seems to be, for many people, sufficient reason to have them keep doing it, never mind the cost in financial and moral bankruptcy.
How about looking at it this way? Any war wage unnecessarily (as is this one), is nothing more than another government program. And unlike many government programs that take decades to snowball into an obscenely expensive, wasteful program with no end in sight, wars have a way of plundering the host economy unlike any other bureaucratic mess.
It seems to me that Saddam had relatively few "high value" targets that would be worth expending even a fraction of that kind of money destroying, let alone the hovels and passenger vehicles they would be used against now. As for whether we are killing the "enemy" in an "economical" manner, it is almost irrelevant in the current situation - William S. Lind has written a great deal about 4th generation warfare, which the Iraqi resistance is employing with increasing effectiveness, while the US Military struggles with a second-generation war-fighting paradigm left over from the WWII era. Not only is it uneconomical, it is, dollar for dollar and casualty for casualty, remarkably ineffective against 4th generation fighters. If this was a just war, I would demand our forces be taught about 4th generation tactics, but since it isn't, I just want them to be brought home safely.
Does anyone require the armed forces to wage war economically? I suppose if one asked whether the military was wasting ordinance and ammunition one would be pilloried as a troop hater. Has anyne compared the cost per enemy casualty over a number of wars to see whether it is getting more expensive? It seems to me that we are spending at least a million dollars per enemy casualty.
Sorry man - I'll just link it.
Doh! I was so happy when the last counter scrolled off the bottom of this page because it eats up resources.
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