HQ to Marines in Afghanistan: Sleep in a Hole

Yes, "sleep in a hole," was essentially the response of Gen. James Conway, commandant of the United States Marine Corps, when I asked him Tuesday afternoon whether the he has enough "infrastructure'' to feed and house the 20,000 Marines who will be in southern Afghanistan by early summer.

But his insistence that Marines can live in the dirt (and prefer it!) raises an important point about the cost of the new strategy and the "surge'' of 30,000 troops announced two weeks ago by President Obama. Most of the additional troops being sent to Afghanistan are not Marines and will not be living in the dirt.

Just at Bagram Air Field, the major U.S. air hub, contractors are just completing huge concrete apartment complexes for Air Force personnel who are vacating undesirable prefab housing. (At Bagram, the Burger King outlet home-delivers!) Most soldiers lived in less desirable circumstances, many in tents that in Afghan summers are stifling and in winter, freezing. At remote outposts, many soldiers live in what could charitably be described as plywood shacks.

Even those cost money, however, along with the pretty decent chow that most military people enjoy in Afghanistan. Thirty thousand more people is a pretty heavy and expensive footprint. In the absence of a better cost estimate, Washington is figuring on about $30 billion a year added cost for the "surge,'' but no one seems to put much credence in that number. The $30 billion is in addition to the $68 billion the administration has asked for to fund operations in Afghanistan for fiscal year 2010.

Neither figure includes the cost of what the military calls, somewhat deceptively, "life support'' for the surge reinforcements headed for Afghanistan this spring and summer. Both numbers are based on past experience, and given past experience in Afghanistan and the Pentagon's record of estimating and controlling costs, I wouldn't bet against that number growing even larger. According to Todd Harrison, an analyst at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, an independent Washington think tank, it costs about $1 million to keep one troop in Afghanistan for one year. That is substantially higher than the cost in Iraq, where, at the height of the Bush administration's "surge'' in 2007, it cost $685,000 per troop per year.

Afghanistan is more expensive because it's hard to get to and hard to get around in. The equipment for a light infantry combat brigade, like the 10th Mountain Division's 1st Brigade, for example, includes vehicles and spare transmissions and tires, but also computers, medical and dental supplies and equipment, water purification equipment, cash, and thousands of other items packed in heavy steel containers and either flown in or shipped by rail to a seaport, transported by freighter to Karachi, Pakistan, and trucked over some of the world's most treacherous roads.

Fuel, according to a study cited by Harrison, costs $25 to $45 per gallon delivered – when the trucks are not hijacked by the Taliban -- and the U.S. military in Afghanistan consumes 8,000 gallons of it per troop per year. Another factor will inflate that $30 billion guesstimate: Defense Department strategists expect the Taliban to fight back this spring and summer with more IEDs and by attacking Afghan government facilities in places where there are few U.S. troops. Both tactics will increase U.S. costs. Additional aircraft will be needed for surveillance, money will be needed for costly jammers and other devices, and troops will have to be moved to the areas where the Taliban are attacking.

All these costs are reasonably straightforward. More worrisome are the less visible costs that are inexorably swelling the defense budget.

America's professional army is acclaimed as the world's best, and that doesn't come cheap. The Pentagon has managed to attract and keep good people by offering terrific benefits, including enlistment bonuses, high quality health care, and a lifetime pension after only 20 years of service (pension payments are kept off the Pentagon's books and hidden elsewhere in the U.S. budget). Military health care costs over $47 billion a year, nearly 10 percent of the Pentagon's base budget, Harrison figures. He projects that the military health care bill will nearly double every ten years. Another less visible cost is for replacing the equipment that's gotten busted or worn out in combat over the past eight years. A lot of it has simply become obsolete, like the thinly-armored Humvees originally sent to Iraq. Equipment that still works is being shipped from Iraq direct to Afghanistan, rather than being shipped home to be refurbished.

Many of these costs are put off from year to year and never funded. For the Marine Corps alone, the backlog of unfunded equipment needs is $15 billion. "It's started to reach a little bit of crisis proportions,'' Conway said Tuesday.

All of this budget analysis, and all other discussions of defense spending, is based on unreliable data, according to the Government Accountability Office, the independent fiscal watchdog agency of Congress. The GAO has been at the Pentagon's throat for two decades trying to get it to clean up what the GAO delicately calls "management weakness'' in figuring out how much it is spending and what it's getting for the money. In part, because of high turnover at the Pentagon, financial management problems have never been fixed. The upshot is the defense budget goes up, Congress cuts where it's the easiest, and the troops often come out on the short end.

This fall, the GAO examined the Pentagon's own oversight agency, the Defense Contract Audit Agency (DCAA). It found widespread violations of GAGAS, which are Generally Accepted Government Accounting Standards. GAO gumshoes looked at 14 DCAA audits and 62 pricing reports and found that each one smelled.

For example, the GAO and the Pentagon's inspector general's office uncovered a case in which a DCAA auditor, examining a major Pentagon contract, came across irregularities and was pressured to ignore them. A DCAA bureaucrat ordered his auditors to overlook the problems and the contractor was paid over $100 million on the contract. No indication of who squealed, but the incident is already subject of a criminal investigation. Maybe the perps should be sent to Afghanistan to live in a hole.