On Saturday, October 4, Day 58 of the American campaign against Daesh (Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant), US aircraft carried out nine strikes inside Iraq and Syria, destroying two tanks, three Humvees, one bulldozer and an unidentified vehicle. The strikes also hit several teams of Daesh and destroyed six of their firing positions. At first glance, that may seem like a lot of damage. Leaving aside the significance of killing Daesh militants and only looking at equipment, the tanks were worth an estimated $4.5 (Dh16.55 million) to $6.5 million apiece and each Humvee cost $150,000 to $250,000, bringing the total value of the equipment destroyed to somewhere between $9.5 and $13.8 million.
However, that is less impressive when one considers that each US “strike” against Daesh can involve several aircraft and munitions and cost up to $500,000, according to Todd Harrison, an expert with the Centre for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, a Washington-based defence think tank. Harrison said the cheapest possible strike could cost roughly $50,000 — assuming a single plane dropping one of the cheaper types of bombs. But the majority of air strikes cost much more, involving F-15s, F-16s, F-22s and other aircraft that cost $9,000 to upwards of $20,000 per hour to operate and explosives that cost tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars. Harrison noted that each strike’s price “depends on the distance to the target site, how long it may need to loiter, what type of aircraft is used and whether it needs aerial refuelling (and how many times)”.
But using his $500,000 upper estimate, the October 4 strike missions alone cost as much as $4.5 million. And those figures do not even include the intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance flights necessary to scope out targets ahead of strikes, which have helped make even the low-level campaign against Daesh hugely expensive. The Pentagon revealed last Monday that it has spent as much as $1.1 billion on military operations against Daesh since June. Even more disheartening, most, if not all, of the equipment being destroyed originally came from the US — which is why we are able to estimate its worth. It was given to the Iraqi Army ahead of the US military’s withdrawal in 2011 and captured by Daesh when it advanced into Iraq earlier this year. That means Washington is now spending hundreds of millions of dollars from the US Treasury to destroy Humvees, tanks and other weapons that American taxpayers purchased. The situation has led some observers to joke that the Pentagon should christen the mission “Operation Hey, That’s My Humvee”.
Last Saturday’s strikes are indicative of a key complexity of the US-led campaign in Iraq and Syria: In throwing its hugely expensive 21st-century weaponry at a band of insurgents, the Pentagon is using planes that can cost nearly $200 million apiece against pickup trucks costing virtually pennies in comparison. That is not a new problem for the US. In the aftermath of the September 11 attacks, the then president George W. Bush famously told four senators that he was not “going to fire a $2 million missile at a $10 empty tent and hit a camel in the b***”. Just one Tomahawk cruise missile costs more than $1 million. The US launched at least 47 last month, though many of them reportedly targeted the mysterious Khorasan Group and not Daesh.
Clearly, even though US engagement so far has taken the form of air strikes rather than “boots on the ground”, the costs have not been low. What is not clear from Pentagon reports is just how those costs measure up against the aggregate value of the fighters, equipment and infrastructure that the Sunni extremist group has lost in the strikes.
As to the number of militants killed, the Pentagon has reported only that air strikes have hit three large units, several small units and an unspecified number of other fighters. To be fair to the Pentagon, though, the cost of the equipment destroyed is a hard number to tally. It is difficult to know exactly when particular pieces of the US hardware, now in the hands of Daesh, were sent to Iraq and what that value is now after accounting for depreciation. That makes the above price tags for equipment, which use today’s “sticker price” for tanks and Humvees, generous estimates of the vehicles’ actual value when destroyed.
Even so, 64 days after air campaign began, and $1.1 billion later, US-led strikes have destroyed arms and vehicles totalling just $123 million to $173 million, by Foreign Policy’s estimate. Granted, that estimate doesn’t account for the harder-to-calculate value of other damaged or destroyed Daesh equipment and infrastructure, including portions of valuable oil refineries under Daesh control. Since expanding air strikes from Iraq to Syria, the US and its Arab coalition partners have carried out 16 strikes on Daesh-held oil refineries. That could represent a significant dent in Daesh’s revenues. These Syrian refineries reportedly earn the group $2 million per day. Refineries in Iraq, which so far have not been hit by US-led air strikes, make the group about $1 million per day. On September 25, the Pentagon said it had crippled most of the Syrian refineries. But, as Foreign Policy reported on Tuesday, just how crippled they are remains unclear.
Besides, most air strikes haven’t targeted refineries. In addition to striking equipment originally from the US, they have hit things like Daesh’s improvised explosive device (IED) emplacements, fighting positions, checkpoints, training camps and garrisons, weapons storage and manufacturing facilities, Daesh-held airfields and various other buildings. The value of many of these targets is relatively insignificant. On September 16, five US air strikes managed only to destroy one truck, one anti-aircraft artillery piece, two small boats and one fighting position. With estimates for the cost of five air strikes going as high as $2.5 million, that means the US used an awfully expensive hammer to hit a couple of relatively cheap nails.
Another recent Central Command press release, using a different acronym the militant group is known by, touted the destruction of “a [Daesh] guard shack” among its victories. The weapon that destroyed the guard shack would have cost tens of thousands of dollars and would have been dropped by an aircraft that, likewise, cost tens of thousands to fly. The shack may not have been very expensive to build, but it certainly was pricey to destroy.
— Washington Post
