US gives away billons in assets in Iraq
The United States Depart of Defense has found a nifty way of cutting costs in planning for the withdrawal of troops from Iraq. Rather than ship home millions of pieces of equipment from Americans bases abroad, the military is simply giving them away.
Nearly two-and-a-half million pieces of equipment, estimated at a cost of $250 million, have so far been given to the Iraqi government by the US military in the last year alone, reports The Huffington Post. As the DoD looks to empty out the bases that cost Americans billions of dollars towards erecting during the last decade, everything from air conditioning units to army tanks are being handed over to the foreign government in order to avoid the costly bill of shipping those supplies back to the States.
“It’s all sunk costs,” retired Army Maj. Gen. Paul Eaton tells HuffPo. “It’s money that we spent and we’re not going to recoup.”
Meanwhile, as the US hands over millions, they are scraping their pockets in order to make ends meet domestically. Yet again, the government is being posed with a possible shutdown in the days ahead, lest lawmakers find a way to balance their ledgers.
The United States spent over $2.4 billion on building posts in Iraq, reports the Congressional Research Service, and nearly $2 billion of that came from contracts with the US Army Corps of Engineer between 2004 and 2010 — and more than half of those deals were inked in 2005 alone.
While President Obama urges lawmakers to allow for the building up of America’s own infrastructure, it looks as if the country invested billions in the last decade overseas. Now that troops prepare to come home, however, all of that is being marked up as a loss.
Read full post | UE times - 26 Sept 2011
