By Agence France-Presse on Friday, June 21st, 2013
US scraps a lot of gear because it leaves Afghanistan – report
The US military has destroyed greater than 77,000 metric lots of military equipment — including mine-resistant troop transport vehicles — because it prepares to withdraw from Afghanistan in late 2014, the Washington Post reported Thursday.
More than $7 billion worth of military equipment isn’t any longer needed, or will be too expensive to ship back to america, and far of it’s being shredded and sold locally as scrap metal, the Post reported, citing US military officials.
Donating the gear to the Afghan government is hard thanks to complicated bureaucratic rules, plus US officials don’t believe the Afghans could maintain the gear.
Plus, it is going to even be too expensive to sell or donate the gear to allied nations as a result of cost of having the equipment out of Afghanistan.
Items being shredded by contract workers from Nepal and other countries on the market as scrap metal include mine resistant ambush protected (MRAP) vehicles, the Post said.
More than 24,000 MRAPs were built for troops in Iraq and Afghanistan starting in 2007 in a crash program that cost some $45 billion, per Pentagon figures.
The MRAPs’ V-shaped hulls help deflect the force of explosions, and the vehicle’s higher chassis keeps troops farther from the most important force of the blast from improvised explosive devices.
US commanders believe the MRAPs helped save thousands of soldiers’ lives, and cite figures that show the selection of casualties from IEDs dropped greater than 80 percent after the vehicles were introduced.
Some 2,000 of the 11,000 MRAPs in Afghanistan had been labeled “excess,” the Post reported.
“We’re making history doing what we’re doing here,” Major General Kurt Stein, who’s overseeing the Afghanistan drawdown, told the newspaper. “This is the biggest retrograde mission in history.”
When the U.S. military withdrew from Iraq it drove much of its gear around the border into Kuwait, sent it back home on ships, or donated it to the Iraqi army, which has the infrastructure to keep up vehicles with complicated mechanics.
US officials however told the Post they don’t believe the Afghan army could maintain such vehicles or other sophisticated equipment.
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