Believe It or Not (2010 Imperial Edition)

In my 1950s childhood, Ripley's Believe It or Not was part
of everyday life, a syndicated comics page feature where you could
stumble upon such mind-boggling facts as: "If all the Chinese in the
world were to march four abreast past a given point, they would never
finish passing though they marched forever and forever." Or if you were
young and iconoclastic, you could chuckle over Mad magazine's
parody, "Ripup's Believe It or Don't!"

With our Afghan and Iraq wars on my mind, I've been wondering whether
Ripley's moment hasn't returned. Here, for instance, are some figures offered
in a Washington Post piece by Lieutenant General James H.
Pillsbury, deputy commanding general of the U.S. Army Materiel Command,
who is deeply involved in the "drawdown of the logistics operation in
Iraq": "There are... more than 341 facilities; 263,000 soldiers,
Defense Department civilians and contractor employees; 83,000
containers; 42,000 vehicles; 3 million equipment items; and roughly $54
billion in assets that will ultimately be removed from Iraq."

Admittedly, that list lacks the "believe it or not" tagline, but
otherwise Ripley's couldn't have put it more staggeringly. And here's
Pillsbury's Ripley-esque kicker: the American drawdown will be the
"equivalent, in personnel terms alone, of relocating the entire
population of Buffalo, New York."

When it comes to that slo-mo drawdown, all the numbers turn out to be
staggering. They are also a reminder of just how the Pentagon has been
fighting its wars in these last years -- like a compulsive shopper
without a 12-step recovery program in sight. Whether it's 3.1
million items of equipment, or 3 million, 2.8
million, or 1.5
million, whether 341 "facilities" (not including perhaps ten
mega-bases which will still be operating in 2011 with tens of thousands
of American soldiers, civilians, and private contractors working and
living on them), or more than 350
forward operating facilities, or 290
bases are to be shut down, the numbers from Iraq are simply out of this
world.

Those sorts of figures define the U.S. military in the Bush era --
and now Obama's -- as the most materiel-profligate war-making machine
ever. Where armies once had baggage trains and camp followers, our camp
followers now help plant our military in foreign soil, build its
housing and defenses, and then supply it with vast
quantities of food, water, fuel, and god knows what else. In this
way, our troops carry not just packs on their backs, but a total,
transplantable society right down to the PXs,
massage
parlors, food courts, and miniature
golf courses. At Kandahar Air Base in Afghanistan, there was until
recently a "boardwalk" that typically included a "Burger King, a Subway
sandwich shop, three cafes, several general stores, a Cold Mountain
Creamery, [and an] Oakley sunglasses outlet." Atypically
enough, however, a TGI Friday's, which had just joined the line-up, was
recently ordered shut
down along with some of the other stores by Afghan war commander
General Stanley McChrystal as inimical to the war effort.

In Ripley's terms, if you were to put all the vehicles, equipment,
and other materiel we managed to transport to Iraq and Afghanistan "four
abreast," they, too, might stretch a fair way around the planet. And
wouldn't that be an illustration worthy of the old Ripley's cartoon --
all those coffee makers and port-a-potties and Internet cafes, even that
imported sand which, if more widely known about, might change the
phrase "taking
coals to Newcastle" to "bringing sand to Iraq"?

For
all the sand Iraq did have, from the point of view of the U.S. military
it didn't have the perfect type for making the miles of protective
"blast walls" that became a common
feature of the post-invasion landscape. So, according
to Stephen Farrell of the New York Times, U.S. taxpayer
dollars floated in boatloads of foreign sand from the United Arab
Emirates and Qatar to create those 15-ton blast walls at $3,500 a pop.
U.S. planners are now evidently wondering whether to ship some of the
leftover walls thousands of miles by staggeringly roundabout routes to
Afghanistan at a transportation cost of $15,000 each.

When it comes to the U.S. drawdown in Iraq and the build-up in
Afghanistan, in fact, the numbers, any numbers, are little short of
unbelievable.

* Believe it or not, for instance, U.S. commanders in our
war zones have more than one
billion congressionally mandated dollars a year at their disposal
to spend on making "friends with local citizens and help[ing] struggling
economies." It's all socked away in the Commander's Emergency Response
Program. Think of it as a local
community-bribery account which, best of all, seems not to require
the slightest accountability to Congress for where or how the money is
spent.

* Believe it or not (small change department), the Pentagon
is planning to spend an initial $50
million from a "$350 million Pentagon program designed to improve
the counterterrorism operations of U.S. allies" on Croatia, Georgia,
Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia, all of whom, in the latest
version of the Coalition of the Billing, just happen to have small
numbers of troops deployed in Afghanistan. The backdrop for this is
Canada's decision
to withdraw its combat forces from Afghanistan in 2011and
a fear
in Washington that the larger European allies may threaten to bail as
well. Think of that $50 million as a down payment on a state bribery
program -- and the Pentagon is reportedly hoping to pry more money loose
from Congress to pay off the smaller "allies" in a bigger way in the
future.

* Believe it or not, the Defense Logistics Agency shipped 1.1
million hamburger patties to Afghanistan in the month of March 2010
(nearly doubling the March 2009 figure). Almost any number you might
care to consider related to the Afghan War is similarly on the rise. By
the fall, the number of American troops there will have nearly
tripled since President Obama took office; American deaths in
Afghanistan have doubled
in the first months of 2010, while the number of wounded has tripled;
insurgent roadside bomb (IED) attacks more
than doubled in 2009 and are still rising; U.S. drone strikes almost
doubled in 2009 and are on track to triple this year; and fuel
deliveries to Afghanistan have nearly
doubled, rising from 15 million gallons a month in March 2009 to 27
million this March. (Keep in mind that, by the time a gallon of gas has
made it to U.S. troops in the field, its cost is estimated at up
to $100.)

* Believe it or not, according
to a recent report by the Pentagon inspector general, private
contractor KBR, holding a $38 billion contract to provide the U.S.
military with "a range of logistic services," has cost Washington $21
million in "waste" on truck maintenance alone by billing for 12 hours of
work when, on average, its employees were actually putting in 1.3
hours.

* Believe it or not, the State Department has paid another
private contractor, Triple Canopy, $438
million since mid-2005 simply to guard the massive, 104-acre U.S.
Embassy in Baghdad, the largest on the planet. That's more than half
the price tag to build the embassy, the running of which is expected to
cost an estimated $1.8
billion dollars in 2010. Triple Canopy now has 1,800 employees
dedicated to embassy protection in the Iraqi capital, mainly Ugandan and
Peruvian security guards. At $736
million to build, the embassy itself is a numbers
wonder (and has only recently had its sizeable playing field
astroturfed - "the first artificial turf sports field in Iraq" -- also
assumedly at taxpayer expense). Fans of Ripley-esque diplomatic
gigantism should have no fears about the future either: the U.S. is now
planning to build
another "mother ship" of similar size and cost in Islamabad, Pakistan.

* Believe it or not, according to Nick Turse of
TomDispatch.com, nearly 400
bases for U.S. troops, CIA operatives, special operations forces,
NATO allies, and civilian contractors have already been constructed in
Afghanistan, topping the base-building figures for Iraq by about 100 in a
situation in which almost every bit of material has to be transported
into the country. The base-building spree has yet to end.

* Believe it or not, according
to the Washington Post, the Defense Department has awarded
a contract worth up to $360 million to the son of an Afghan cabinet
minister to transport U.S. military supplies through some of the most
dangerous parts of Afghanistan -- and his company has no trucks. (He
hires subcontractors who evidently pay off the Taliban as part of a large-scale
protection racket that allows the supplies through unharmed.) This
contract is, in turn, part of a $2.1 billion Host Nation Trucking
contract whose recipients may be deeply involved in extortion and
smuggling rackets, and over which the Pentagon reportedly exercises
little oversight.

Believe it or not, the
staggering logistics effort underway to transport part of the American
way of war from Iraq to Afghanistan is now being compared by those
involved to Hannibal
(not Lecter) crossing the Alps with his cohort of battle elephants, or
to that ancient conqueror of conquerors, Alexander the Great ("the
largest building boom in Afghanistan since Alexander built Kandahar").
It has become commonplace as well to say, as
President Obama did at Bagram Air Base on his recent six-hour
Afghan drop-in, that the U.S. military is "the finest military in the
history of the world," or as his predecessor put
it even more emphatically, "the greatest force for human liberation
the world has ever known."

The Ripley-esque numbers, however, tell a somewhat different story.
If war were really a Believe It or Not matter, or victory lay
in the number of hamburgers transported or the price of fuel consumed,
the U.S. military would have been the winner long ago. After all, it
may be the most product-profligate military with the heaviest
"footprint" in history. Though it's seldom thought strange (and rarely
commented upon in the U.S.), the Pentagon practices war as a form of
mass consumption and so, not surprisingly, bears a striking resemblance
to the society it comes from. Like the Taliban, it carries its way of
life to war on its back.

It's striking, of course, that all this is happening at a moment
when, domestically, small businesses can't get loans and close to 10% of
the population is officially out of work, while state governments are
desperately scrabbling for
every available dollar (and some that aren't), even as they cut
what would once have been considered
basic services. In contrast, the Pentagon is fighting its distant wars
as if American pockets had no bottoms, the national treasury had no
limits, and there was quite literally no tomorrow.

And there's one more small contrast to be made when it comes to the
finest military in the history of the world: for all the private
security guards, mountains of burgers, lakes of gasoline, miles of blast
walls, and satchels of cash to pass out to the locals, it's been
remarkably unsuccessful in its pacification campaigns against some of
the motliest forces of our time. The U.S. military has been fought to
something like a draw by relatively modest-sized, relatively lightly
armed minority insurgencies that don't even pass muster when it comes to
shooting
straight.

Vast piles of money and vast quantities of materiel have been
squandered; equipment by the boatload has been used up; lives have been
wasted in profusion; and yet the winners of our wars might turn
out to be Iran
and China.
The American way of war, unfortunately, has the numbers to die for,
just not to live by.