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 ever.” 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 March 30, 2010, 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 twelve-step recovery program in sight. Whether it’s 3.1 million items of equipment, 2.8 million, or 1.5 million (all numbers cited in one media account or another), whether 341 “facilities” (not including perhaps ten mega-bases which are still operating with tens of thousands of American soldiers, civilians, and private contractors working and living on them) or 290 bases are to be shut down, the numbers from Iraq are simply out of this world.
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.
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 on close to forever. And wouldn’t that be an illustration worthy of the old Ripley’s cartoon—all those coffeemakers and porta-potties and Internet cafes, even imported sand that, if more widely known about, might change the phrase “taking coals to Newcastle“ to “bringing sand to Iraq”?
You see, 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 shipped in boatloads of 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 buildup in Afghanistan, in fact, the numbers, any numbers, are little short of unbelievable.
• Believe it or not, 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 that, 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.
• 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).
• Believe it or not, the State Department has paid private contractors Triple Canopy $438 million since mid-2005 simply to guard the massive U.S. Embassy in Baghdad. That’s more than half the price tag to build the embassy. 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 even had its sizeable playing field astroturfed—“the first artificial turf sports field in Iraq”—also assumedly at taxpayer expense.
• Believe it or not, according to Nick Turse, nearly four hundred 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 one hundred in a situation where 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 involved in transporting 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”).
If war were really a Believe It or Not matter, or victory lay in the number of hamburgers transported, 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 United States, the Pentagon practices war as a form of mass consumption and so, not surprisingly, bears a striking resemblance to the society from which it comes. 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 percent of the population is officially out of work, while state governments are desperately
