Wearing Out and Adding Up
Army Costs Increase as Terrain Takes Toll on Equipment
By Jonathan Weisman and Renae Merle
Washington Post Staff Writers
Saturday, September 13, 2003; Page A01
If lawmakers and citizens wonder how much of the Iraq war's
eventual cost will be covered by President Bush's $87
billion emergency spending request, they need look no
further than a Bradley Fighting Vehicle's track.
Normally, a Bradley gets new treads just once a year, after
about 800 miles. But for the U.S. Army, these are anything
but normal times, and the 600-odd Bradleys in Iraq are
trudging 1,200 miles a month, running security escorts the
military never imagined would be needed so long after
"major combat operations" had ended.
The result is that Bradleys in Iraq need new tracks every
60 days, at $22,576 per vehicle. As many as a third of the
Bradleys patrolling the dangerous "Sunni Triangle" are out
of commission. The Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co. is ramping up
production for new tracks, while the Army is running three
shifts a day, seven days a week, rebuilding old tracks at
the Red River Army Depot in Texas, but workers are still
three months behind the Army's demands. Tracks are being
flown to Baghdad as fast as they can be made, then
apportioned to the units that need them most.
The tracks this fiscal year will have cost $230 million,
nearly triple the $78 million the Army spent on track
repair and replacement in 2002.
Those worn-down strips of rubber and steel attest to a far
broader problem, defense officials and military analysts
say: The punishing and dangerous terrain of Iraq and the
unanticipated intensity of combat, or "operational tempo,"
are driving up military costs as significantly as they are
raising the danger to the troops.
The toll the war is taking on the Army's troops and
equipment will lock in much higher military spending for
years to come, regardless of how the occupation goes from
here, defense experts say.
"This $87 billion is really just a down payment," said
Scott Lilly, the Democratic staff director of the House
Appropriations Committee and a military procurement expert.
It is a point that military officials emphasize.
"We assumed that operations would cease a lot earlier than
they have," said an Army official, who spoke on the
condition of anonymity. "They haven't ceased. The planning
process was always to downsize, for the operational tempo
to drop dramatically by now. The surprise is, we continue
to operate at a very, very high op tempo with a very, very
large force."
Army officials say they will need more than $16 billion to
repair and replace worn and expended military hardware and
reconstitute a force that has been exhausted by
simultaneous operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. The
"reset" involves more than 50,000 wheeled and tracked
vehicles, every aviation system deployed in the Middle East
and 300 different computer, intelligence, surveillance and
reconnaissance systems.
"The dollar cost still slaps you in the eye," the Army
official said.
Of the president's $86.6 billion request for the coming
fiscal year, only $3.3 billion is earmarked for that
"reset," congressional sources said, meaning that the
expenditures will be stretched out for years to come.
That $3.3 billion is a small part of the $65.5 billion that
would go to the Defense Department; the other $21.1 billion
would go for reconstruction. Almost half of the defense
money, $32.3 billion, would be used for fuel, food and
other costs of combat and occupation, while $18.5 billion
is being requested for reserve and National Guard salaries
and other personnel costs.
The escalation has infuriated some members of Congress and
their staffs, who say that many of the costs should have
been anticipated. Even now, they say, bureaucratic
bottlenecks are raising costs and slowing the flow of
supplies to Iraq. Beyond the Bradley treads, defense
officials say, troops have had problems with battery
supplies and engine parts, and logistics officers are
bracing for a feared shortage of helicopter blades.
"There's widespread concern that the Department of Defense
just hadn't thought through this thing adequately," said
James W. Dyer, the Republican staff director of the House
Appropriations Committee, who attributed supply problems to
"very poor planning."
Military officials are also becoming more open about the
problems, especially the shortage of Bradley tracks.
"We've consumed everything," Gen. Paul J. Kern, commander
of the Army Materiel Command, said three weeks ago. Army
resupply, he said, is costing "in clearly the millions of
dollars per day."
In documents released to Congress, the administration says
it will need $1.9 billion for emergency procurement. Of
that, $143 million would buy 595 heavily armored Humvees.
Including sophisticated computer tracking systems and other
advanced equipment, the Humvee costs could be nearly
$250,000 each, an Army official said. The White House also
wants $300 million for about 60,000 three-piece body-armor
suits, so Army commanders can issue flak jackets to
virtually every soldier in Iraq.
"Here's a blinding flash of the obvious," one Army official
said. "There is no front line out there."
Beyond those costs are the mounting toll that Iraqi
operations are taking on military equipment designed -- and
in most cases, built -- in the 1980s to confront Soviet
armies in Central Europe.
"Part of the problem here is the age of the equipment,"
said Loren B. Thompson, a military analyst at the Lexington
Institute. "The Army has been under-investing in
modernization for years."
The turbine engines of the Army's M1-A1 Abrams tank are
being mangled by Iraqi sand, as are the engines and rotor
blades of helicopters. One rebuilt helicopter engine can
cough up enough sand to fill a 55-gallon drum, Lilly said.
"The 101st Airborne Division's helicopters are just sucking
down money," said retired Gen. Bill Nash, who commanded an
armored brigade in the Persian Gulf War.
Army logistical units have already had to provide $1.3
billion in spare parts for Apache attack helicopters and
other aircraft, Army officials say. That is more than three
times as much as the Army normally spends on aviation spare
parts.
Operating helicopters in the sands of Iraq "is like rubbing
the blades against sandpaper," said Wimpy D. Pybus, a
Pentagon logistics official.
Army depots in the United States will have to roughly
double their normal annual spending of $1.6 billion to
repair and rebuild aircraft, missile systems, land vehicles
and communications equipment in the coming months.
The cost of tires alone soared to $236 million for the
fiscal year that ends this month, up from $80 million in
2002.
New helicopter rotor blades have cost the Army more than
$200 million this fiscal year, quadruple the usual cost.
"And we're not finished yet," the Army official said. "We
are flying the hell and driving the hell out of our
vehicles."
Escalating costs are not confined to weapons systems. The
Army is trucking 552,000 bottles of spring water a day to
thirsty troops from supply depots in Kuwait and Turkey.
One supply unit out of Fort Riley, Kan., runs 30 convoys a
day from Kuwait into Iraq, with as many as 30 trucks in a
convoy.
Army radios are designed to work over dozens of miles, not
the hundreds of miles separating roving motorized patrols
in Iraq. To maintain contact, the military has had to spend
tens of millions of dollars on new satellite communications
systems and millions more to purchase commercial bandwidth
channels.
The Satellite Industry Association said the military spent
$300 million to $400 million on commercial satellite
capacity during the major phase of the conflict -- and
those costs are continuing.
Even cost-saving efforts of the 1990s have come back to
bite. Because the Army shed many of its supply and support
battalions, it is paying the salaries of 6,000 civilian
contractors, along with tens of thousands of dollars in
added insurance costs, for services as mundane as
maintaining portable toilets, delivering ice and disposing
of trash. Most of that money is to pay contractor Kellogg,
Brown & Root Inc., a subsidiary of Halliburton Co.,
formerly headed by Vice President Cheney.
On Friday, Democratic Reps. Henry A. Waxman (Calif.) and
John D. Dingell (Mich.) asked White House Budget Director
Joshua B. Bolten why the president had requested $2.1
billion more to rebuild Iraq's oil fields, mostly for
Halliburton, when in July the Army Corps of Engineers said
the job would cost $1.1 billion. Of that, Halliburton has
already received $948 million.
White House budget office spokesman Trent Duffy said the
administration will provide a detailed explanation when the
president formally requests the emergency spending.
The nation's defense contractors actually may be hurt by
the ongoing costs of the war. Large defense contractors
such as Bethesda-based Lockheed Martin Corp. and Boeing Co.
of Chicago derive their real profits from large weapons
such as fighter jets, not spare parts or ammunition,
industry officials said. "It is not going to move the
needle for the industry," said Byron Callan, defense
industry analyst for Merrill Lynch & Co.
If the Pentagon is forced to shift money from expensive
development projects to offset the cost of war, it could
take a toll on the defense giants, industry officials said.
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