Unforeseen Spending on Materiel Pumps Up Iraq War Bill

Army Chief of Staff Peter J. Schoomaker told Congress that the Pentagon did not "have a good prediction about what our battle losses would be." (By Sarah L. Voisin -- The Washington Post)

Last year, depot workers upgraded 5,000 Humvees with new engines and new transmissions to support ever-heavier armor. This year, they will see close to 9,000. They will also have to patch up 7,000 more machine guns, 5,000 more tank tracks and 100 more M1A1 Abrams tanks.

In 2001, the depots logged 11 million labor hours. Last year, that reached 20 million, and this year, it will total 24 million, Motsek said. Depot officials had hoped to work 27 million hours, but funding delays forced them to cut back.

And that is only the work being done in the United States. In and around Iraq, 53,000 people -- 52,000 of them contractors -- are maintaining and rebuilding lightly damaged equipment, a senior Senate defense aide said. Indian workers are refurbishing U.S. Humvees for $6 an hour.

"The equipment is wearing out five times faster than normal operations," said Jeremiah Gertler, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and a former House Armed Services Committee procurement aide.

What cannot be repaired has to be replaced. Procurement costs were a tiny fraction of the initial emergency war requests, Kosiak said. This year, new equipment purchases will consume 20 percent of the war funding. That has led to what some critics see as wasteful expenditures. The Senate bill includes $230 million to replace an unspecified number of CH-46E Sea Knight helicopters lost in battle with three V-22 Osprey tilt-rotor aircraft. In other words, senators plan to replace a Marine Corps workhorse with an experimental aircraft that critics say will never be useful in combat.

Such costs were always there, Gertler said, but Bush administration officials and members of Congress put off maintenance and procurement expenditures to keep down the war's price tag.

Schoomaker said as much at a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing in February, when he remarked that a "bow wave" of costs "pushed forward from previous years" is now cresting.

"It was just recently that we started to get procurement money" for equipment repair and replacement in supplemental funding, he testified.

Schoomaker warned that such costs will continue, even after U.S. forces withdraw from Iraq. To fully re-equip and upgrade the U.S. Army after the war ends would cost $36 billion over six years, and that figure assumes U.S. forces would begin withdrawing in July and would be completely out of Iraq by the end of 2008, an assumption Bush dismissed when he suggested withdrawal will be up to his White House successor.

Sen. Jack Reed (D-R.I.), a member of the Armed Services Committee, said a more protracted fight could triple Schoomaker's $36 billion figure.