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You may have heard about all the equipment that got left behind when the U.S. left Iraq.
A lot of it was worn out, and it's expensive to ship many of those items back to the States. Big armies typically leave a lot of stuff behind.
I'd say the problem was twofold: first, we never should have been on the ground in Iraq 2003-11. And secondly, we went way overboard building up a presence there without any long-term plan to make it worthwhile. We had more than five hundred bases and outposts at the height of operations, with construction costs totalling around $2.5 billion. Facilities like Ayn al-Asad Airbase, aka "Camp Cupcake."
Were we going to maintain a large military presence there for decades? Was there any serious consideration put into answering that difficult question? Not until Mr. Bush finally woke up in his second term and realized how he'd been manipulated by people like Dickhead Chaingang with his ties to private contractors like Haliburton, Donnie Dumbsfeld, the wise-cracking buffoon he had put in charge of the Pentagon, and the other toads who led us into that disastrous invasion and very poorly planned occupation.
>>We need 3 Abrams tanks. Don't spend money on 50 Abrams tanks.
We've been selling tanks to Iraq, and we also left some behind.
Congress has approved several batches of arms sales to Iraq. The U.S. delivered the first batch of 140 refurbished Abrams tanks in 2012 in a deal valued at about $860 million.
As many as 70 of the first batch of 140 Abrams tanks were destroyed or fell into disrepair as the Iraqi Army fought the Islamic State in Anbar province this summer, former Iraqi Defense Minister Abdul Qader Obeidi said in an interview with Foreign Policy. Militants may have also captured a few, he said. — "Iraq Needs Weapons But Can It Keep Them?," ForeignPolicy.com, Nov 20, 2014
As many as 70 of the first batch of 140 Abrams tanks were destroyed or fell into disrepair as the Iraqi Army fought the Islamic State in Anbar province this summer, former Iraqi Defense Minister Abdul Qader Obeidi said in an interview with Foreign Policy. Militants may have also captured a few, he said. — "Iraq Needs Weapons But Can It Keep Them?," ForeignPolicy.com, Nov 20, 2014
>> Our military didn't care that it got left because so much of it was unnecessary.
Unnecessary for what? State National Guard units needed a lot of the same kind of equipment left behind in Iraq when called to respond to Hurricane Katrina and other natural disasters here in the US. It was in short supply, and the money that could have been used to buy it had already been expended.