Massive government waste aids our enemies

It appears that some of the NOT so bright Obama loyal so-called ‘military planners’ have decided that a whopping 20% of all the military equipment we currently have in Afghanistan will NOT be shipped back to the US, because they claim the equipment is NO longer needed, too expensive to ship home, and would be a logistical nightmare to retrieve from the field. So the options were to leave the equipment, destroy it, move it to other military locations, or transfer it to another country. And of course they decided to leave it behind claiming it would cost around $5.7 billion to move or transfer the equipment, and they were NOT willing to spend the money or take the time involved to do either.

Of course it NEVER occurred to this Obama bunch to just ‘give’ the equipment to geographically close by Israel. It would be a fraction of the cost to transfer the equipment to Israel compared to shipping it back to the US. And it would help counter the F-16 fighter jets and Abrams tanks Obama just ‘gave’ the Muslim Brotherhood controlled Egyptian government…NEVER occurred to them at all…but then again we all know why.

So out of the roughly 750,000 pieces of major military equipment used in Afghanistan…equipment worth an estimated $36+ billion…it’s been decided that we can afford to just leave behind 20% of it…equipment that amounts to seven billion…B as in BILLION…dollars…military equipment that includes high tech, state-of-the art tanks, aircraft, trucks, armored vehicles, and the much needed Mine-Resistant Ambush Protected vehicles, with all either being destroyed at best or left to fall into enemy hands at worst…and ‘We the People’ are the losers for a large amount of our hard earned tax dollars will have just been thrown away.

And the equipment left behind will be crushed and melted down and sold for pennies per pound on the Afghan scrap market. In fact, the US military has already destroyed 170+ million pounds of vehicles and other military equipment as it rushes to meet Obama’s goal of leaving Afghanistan by the end of 2014. And if that doesn’t infuriate you how about this…according to the military planners, if we brought back the scheduled to be left behind 20%, transporting it back to the US would cost almost $3 billion and repairing it would cost upwards of $9 billion…but isn’t our equipment serviced while in use…of course it is so this ‘supposed’ repair bill is pure fabrication in its amount. Sure some equipment will need servicing, after all its been used in war, but $9 billion dollars worth of repairs…NO…I don’t think so.And by the way Britain will also be leaving military equipment behind…equipment worth more than £2billion (2.44 billion US dollars)…equipment that will also be scrapped, sold, or given away by the Ministry of Defense (to whom I wonder) when they withdraw from Afghanistan.

Now some numbers for Iraq…in the months leading up to us going into Iraq, the US Transportation Command delivered over 1 million tons of cargo, making at least 150 round trips by ships to do so. That translates into major numbers of needed equipment to stock the 505 US military bases and outposts in operation at the height of the war…equipment that included tanks, armored vehicles, anti-aircraft missiles and such, let alone the equipment needed to actually construct said bases themselves…bases constructed at a cost of more than $2.4 billion. All done with construction equipment our taxpayer dollars paid for and most of it being left behind.

And to add insult to injury, in the year 2011 alone, we gave the Iraqis military equipment with a fair market value of $247 million on top of the $157 million worth of military equipment we already had transferred to them before the Obama announced withdrawal officially started…translating into over 2.4 million pieces of actual military equipment ‘given’ away…as in NOTHING was paid for by the Iraqis to us.

And while the Iraq numbers are NOT as great as the Afghan numbers there’s a simple reason why we didn’t leave as much behind in Iraq, and it’s because we had a port to ship the equipment home from. Afghanistan is landlocked making it harder but NOT impossible to bring equipment out, and with us still fighting there the equipment is still needed right up until the deadline for the Obama announced withdrawal. And this fact alone proves where this man’s loyalties lie for he knows the equipment is needed and deliberately set his timetable so we could NOT bring it home…knowing it will indeed eventually fall into the hands of al-Qaeda, for the Afghan forces are weak and ineffective at best.

And here’s an interesting fact…large numbers of weapons and military equipment was also left behind when the Soviet Union pulled out of Afghanistan in 1989, and while some of that equipment was sold on the black market or through weapons merchants a lot of it ended up in the hands of terrorists…terrorists like al-Qaeda…and those weapons in turn were used against our troops. And the same thing will happen when we leave our equipment behind only this time al-Qaeda will NOT only use it against us but against any civilians who oppose them, and the weak Afghan military will not be able to stop them.

But the bottom line remains that we spent enormous amounts of taxpayer dollars to purchase this needed equipment, and to just leave it behind says our tax dollars and ‘We the People’ be damned. This equipment must be shipped home for the next war…and rest assured there will be a next war…there always is (war is big business after all) with the next war probably in Syria….and what happens when we need this equipment and it won’t be there…is this Obama’s plan…just something to think about…