https://theglobalherald.com/news/afghan-scrap-yards-sell-us-troops-trashed-equipment/
[video=youtube_share;MP-EowAOew4]https://youtu.be/MP-EowAOew4[/video]
The rape of the U.s taxpayers.
Nothing new. Saw news articles about this 15 years ago
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Yeah….we sure showed them….
Yeah the Chinese were buying metal scrapped from our equipment years ago.
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I read it was cheaper to leave equipment than to bring it back to the states (logistics, freight, fuels, etc…), although don’t know if that was a real reason.
Unsurprising, after WWII the cost of dumping surplus planes in the ocean was less than the cost to bring them home for salvage-and-scrap…
When my unit left Iraq in 2005, we left behind a lot of our equipment. You should have seen the U.S. military junk yards. A lot of it was not junk. The cost to bring it back was definitely a consideration.
Happens every time. It ain’t like that stuff cost real money, just taxpayer dollars. But like folks have said bringing it all the way back home just to scrap it anyway ain’t exactly cost effective. Stripping anything sensitive and judicious use of incendiaries is about it unless it’s coming home.
Same in Afghanistan. I wish I had had the time and tools (tools more than time) to rip a Toyota Diesel engine out of the LCs and Hiluxs we scrapped out. I would have paid to ship it home, and I got a free freight shipment when I left!
This was a pretty big sore spot for me. I was at BAF in 2013; and at the time we thought afghanistan was closing out. I was doing area security ops in an old MRAP that was a 08 from iraq. Every single day I mounted up in this worn out, completely wrong for the AO vic, and would drive by lot FULL of brand new MATV’s and brit vehicles. They weren’t even really drivable they where so new. Like had to peel the plastic off the windows new. The word in the E4 mafia was that those vehicles were set to be left when we abandoned the base; so there was no reason to get them operational and to the working units.
You should have seen the ex-Soviet aircraft piled up at Bagram in early 2002.
JBAD, too. I sure wish I still had that pic of me in a jet. Couldn’t go near the helos, though.