‘Breach of Trust,’ by Andrew J. Bacevich

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/08/books/review/breach-of-trust-by-andrew-j-bacevich.html?_r=1&




Overcommitted
By RACHEL MADDOW
Published: September 5, 2013

Thanks to the magic of American national security politics, a number of young men who grew up in Nepal have found their way west, over northern India and across the breadth of Pakistan, to work at Kandahar Airfield in Afghanistan, destroying million-dollar trucks bought by American taxpayers. They wield blowtorches and wear fireproof suits in the crushing heat, and — according to reporting by Ernesto Londoño at The Washington Post — it takes about 12 hours to demolish each of the vehicles. The trucks need to be cut into pieces small enough to be fed into industrial metal shredders, which grind the parts down into tiny bits of scrap that are sold locally for a few cents per pound. In May, about 11 million pounds of this scrap were apparently sold; by now it is probably more. The contractors who buy it call it “gold dust.”

The reason it takes so much time and effort to break down the trucks is because they were designed to be indestructible. They are Mine Resistant Ambush Protected vehicles, which everyone just calls MRAPs. In the early years of the Iraq war, one brave soldier confronted the visiting defense secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, to ask why troops were salvaging scrap metal out of junkyards to bolt onto soft-skinned Humvees as “hillbilly armor.” By about 2007 we finally started supplying MRAPs to the battlefield.

Their prodigious armoring and smart V-shaped hulls were designed to deflect blasts from roadside bombs and more. If you have ever ridden in one, it feels roughly as if you’ve put a steering wheel and some seat belts inside a bank vault and taken it out for a spin. Those are the million-dollar vehicles that third-country contractors at Kandahar are now shredding, by the thousands, into gold dust for the Afghan scrap market.

When the drawdown is done and the Afghanistan war hits its scheduled end-date next December, the plan is for the Army to still be larger by 10,000 soldiers than it was on 9/11. What we are steaming toward, at the end of more than 12 years of continual hot warfare, is not so much cold warfare or even peace, but rather a kind of high idle, with the expectation of constant overseas military involvement, at some level, somewhere. Even with continued debate over the drawdown and the idiotic sequester, no one expects that we will stop spending more on defense than the next 15 countries combined.



unhappycamper comment: Chopping up $1,000,000 MRAPs... These endless wars are killing our economy.