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Ask a Vet
Author: TriSec    Date: 08/23/2011 10:31:05

Good Morning.

Today is our 3,079th day in Iraq and our 3,607th day in Afghanistan.

We'll start this morning as we always do; with the latest casualty figures from our ongoing wars, courtesy of antiwar.com:

American Deaths
Since war began (3/19/03): 4474
Since "Mission Accomplished" (5/1/03): 4335
Since Handover (6/29/04): 3615
Since Obama Inauguration (1/20/09): 246
Since Operation New Dawn: 46

Other Coalition Troops - Iraq: 318
US Military Deaths - Afghanistan: 1,744
Other Military Deaths - Afghanistan: 937
Contractor Employee Deaths - Iraq: 1,487
Journalists - Iraq : 348
Academics Killed - Iraq: 448

We find this morning's cost of war passing through:

$ 1, 239, 114, 500, 000 .00



Continuing on from Saturday, I'll try to be brief today and just pull a summary and talking point or two from each story...there's still a lot to go through.

We'll start with the economy. While we've spent endless time here at AAV on the challenges faced by returning vets, there's a small subset of civilians that are doing the reverse. Some folks are having such a hard time in this economy that they're starting to look to Iraq for work. In all honesty, I have looked at the Middle East myself; data is data and it still needs to be transmitted...EDI jobs are truly universal.


...Years of punishing recession and persistent high unemployment rates have places millions of Americans in places and situations they'd never dreamed of. For Lopez, that place is a government complex in Ramadi, Iraq, about 60 miles west of Baghdad. After years of being unable to land a firefighter job near his home in Miami, Lopez took a job as a government contractor fighting fires in the war zone. He's just completing his first year there.

"No money is worth risking your life over, but I had to do it to provide for my family," said Lopez, who spoke to me in a series of e-mails and telephone conversations from Iraq.

Faced with mounting credit card debt and with a 3-year-old son to feed, Lopez, 31, made the difficult choice to leave home and head to the Middle East. He'd considered becoming a firefighter in Iraq since 2006, but by last year, he felt he had run out of options.

"I'm doing it out of necessity. I got into this situation, with the economy going down. If I wasn't in debt, I wouldn't have come over here," he said.

The dual menace of credit card debt and unemployment has left many Americans looking for a way out; for Jadiam, the war has provided his financial escape route....



Moving on to a 'paired' story...remember when our troops had insufficient armor and armored vehicles to face the daily IED threat? Many hundreds of troops were injured or killed for the want of proper equipment. As the battlefield evolves, so does the protective gear. MIT is working with the Pentagon to gather data and build a better helmet.


...The Pentagon has pumped hundreds of millions of dollars into the overall effort to develop a better helmet, said Michael J. Leggieri Jr., director of the Department of Defense Blast Injury Research Program Coordinating Office.

“It’s critically important that we first understand the mechanism, and then we move to the next step of how we can figure out how to best protect against the injury,’’ Leggieri said.

That effort will start on the battlefield. This fall, about 30,000 soldiers will carry tiny sensors in their helmets to record data about blows to their heads.

Back home, scientists will add the results to reams of information on how the brain reacts to trauma. Researchers will pay particular attention to clues that help them decode their biggest enigma: how blast waves of energy from explosions affect brain tissue.

“If we do not understand the injury, we are not going to be able to make a lot of progress in the protection system. It’s like trying to design a bridge without knowing that you’re going to make it out of steel,’’ said Raul A. Radovitzky, associate director of MIT’s Institute for Soldier Nanotechnologies.

Radovitzky made a discovery last year that might have broad implications. Through modeling studies, he found that face shields could help protect brains against such blast waves...


But alas....those helmets will need to be tested somehow. Here's hoping that they fare better than the armor plate testing that took place between 2004-2006.


WASHINGTON — The Army improperly tested new bullet-blocking plates for body armor and cannot be certain that 5 million pieces of the critical battlefield equipment meet the standards to protect U.S. troops, the Defense Department’s inspector general found.

The Pentagon report focused on seven Army contracts for the plates, known as ballistic inserts, awarded between 2004 and 2006 and totaling $2.5 billion. The inspector general’s audit, carried out over a two-year period ending in March, found the tests were incomplete, conducted with the wrong size plates or relied on ballistic test rounds that were inconsistent. Due to the demands of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, tests under certain temperatures and altitudes were scrapped altogether.

“Consequently, the Army cannot be sure that ballistic inserts meet ... requirements,” the report said. “As a result, the Army lacks assurance that 5.1 million ballistic inserts acquired through the seven contracts provide appropriate protection.”

The inspector general said it did not conduct its own tests so it couldn’t say whether the plates were defective.

In response, the Army said Tuesday that it had initiated improvements to the testing system before and during the inspector general’s audit. The service also said “all inspector general recommendations to improve the testing processes have been implemented. ... The Army continues to work with the test community for test improvements to provide the best body armor possible to the soldier.”

The Aug. 1 report was the fourth in a series by the inspector general in response to a request from Rep. Louise Slaughter. Since January 2006, the New York Democrat has pressed the military about the effectiveness of body armor after The New York Times reported that 80 percent of Marines serving in Iraq who had been shot in the upper body had died because of inadequate body armor.


Finally this morning, we'll end up back at the Cost of War. If you haven't looked at the link today, please take a moment to do so now. I find watching our treasure go down the drain strangely mesmerizing...it's kind of like watching a slow-motion disaster. You know the inevitable result, but still can't look away. Alas, despite the National Priorities Project's best efforts, they are dealing with government accountants. The sad truth is nobody really knows how much the wars cost.


WASHINGTON — When congressional cost-cutters meet later this year to decide on trimming the federal budget, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq could represent juicy targets. But how much do the wars actually cost the U.S. taxpayer?


Nobody really knows. The National Priorities Project estimates the total financial cost of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars at over $1.23 trillion http://costofwar.com
Nobody really knows.

Yes, Congress has allotted $1.3 trillion for war spending through fiscal year 2011 just to the Defense Department. There are long Pentagon spreadsheets that outline how much of that was spent on personnel, transportation, fuel and other costs. In a recent speech, President Barack Obama assigned the wars a $1 trillion price tag.

But all those numbers are incomplete. Besides what Congress appropriated, the Pentagon spent an additional unknown amount from its $5.2 trillion base budget over that same period. According to a recent Brown University study, the wars and their ripple effects have cost the United States $3.7 trillion, or more than $12,000 per American.

Lawmakers remain sharply divided over the wisdom of slashing the military budget, even with the United States winding down two long conflicts, but there's also a more fundamental problem: It's almost impossible to pin down just what the U.S. military spends on war.

To be sure, the costs are staggering.

According to Defense Department figures, by the end of April the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan — including everything from personnel and equipment to training Iraqi and Afghan security forces and deploying intelligence-gathering drones — had cost an average of $9.7 billion a month, with roughly two-thirds going to Afghanistan. That total is roughly the entire annual budget for the Environmental Protection Agency.

To compare, it would take the State Department — with its annual budget of $27.4 billion — more than four months to spend that amount. NASA could have launched its final shuttle mission in July, which cost $1.5 billion, six times for what the Pentagon is allotted to spend each month in those two wars.

What about Medicare Part D, President George W. Bush's 2003 expansion of prescription drug benefits for seniors, which cost a Congressional Budget Office-estimated $385 billion over 10 years? The Pentagon spends that in Iraq and Afghanistan in about 40 months.


So there you have it. I wish the news were better, or that there were fewer stories, but you know that as long as we're at this there's always going to be something to write about.
 

61 comments (Latest Comment: 08/23/2011 20:33:38 by Mondobubba)
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