The United States is now losing the war in Afghanistan, and is failing to consolidate its victory in Iraq. Reversing this situation requires changes in strategy, but it also requires significant additional resources. It may be tempting for the Obama Administration and the Congress to deny this reality, but any failure to provide the additional funds and forces needed to win, and to correct seven years of under-resourcing the Afghan conflict, may well lead to eventual defeat.
The challenges involved are described in detail in a new analysis by Erin K. Fitzgerald and Anthony H. Cordesman for the Burke Chair at CSIS. This paper is entitled Resourcing for Defeat: The Critical Failures In Planning, Programming, Budgeting and Resourcing the Afghan and Iraq Wars.
It documents a major grand strategic failure on the part of the United States. Effective war fighting requires effective planning, and this is especially true of resources. The United States, however, failed to develop meaningful long-term strategies and plans for the Iraq and Afghan Wars, and failed to translate them into budgets and well-defined requests for resources.
It dealt with both wars by budgeting for each year in an annual increment and without tying its resource requests to a coherent campaign plan for warfighting or armed national building. It never developed a consistent or credible long-term funding profile for war fighting, nor did it properly manage either conflict.
The Bush Administration failed to develop a meaningful long-term strategy or plan for the Iraq and Afghan Wars, while also failing to properly resource its wars and produce sound budgets. For the past eight budgets, the Department of Defense requested emergency supplemental or “bridge” funding outside of the regular defense budget.
This dual-track budget process created numerous problems in terms of ensuring the effective planning and resourcing of the wars, and ensuring suitable Congressional and media review.
Moreover, DOD consistently sought funding for programs that do not meet the reasonable test for a war-related emergency. In essence, the Department treated the supplemental and baseline budgets as fungible, compromising the integrity of the normal budgeting process.
The Burke Chair has prepared an overview of the current estimates of the cost of the war to date, and of possible future costs. While it surveys budget requests made by the Department of Defense (DOD), it relies heavily on work by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), Congressional Research Service (CRS), and General Accountability Office (GAO).
Although there are problems in the available data and many different ways to estimate costs, the analysis shows that war costs of $915 billion have been covered by supplemental emergency appropriations, with $687 billion going to the Iraq War and $228 billion going to Afghanistan.
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