Defense contractor wasting literal tons of money.
The amount of money I see wasted here is astounding. There’s a place called the “RPAT yard” where they shred/incinerate EVERYTHING in an effort to reduce US presence in Afghanistan. It doesn’t matter how expensive or re-usable it was, just destroy it so we don’t have to worry about sending it home or finding someone to sell it to.
MRAPs, for example, cost about $500,000 for a vanilla truck. There is an endless field of them on Bagram waiting to be shredded and sold for scrap. They weigh in at about 30,000lbs and are sold for ~93 cents/pound. Call it $30,000 of scrap metal, even though it’s probably a lot less.
I guess the customers are taxpayers.
Edit: from my understanding, most of it is being bought locally and then re-sold to China. I can’t find any corroborating sources, but that’s just what I’ve heard through the RPAT grapevine.
Also, shipping them all home would be my second-to-last option. I would sooner sell them to other governments at a discount. I made this argument to a lady I met doing cost-analysis here, and her response was “we wouldn’t want to give our tactical advantages to other countries,” which is an argument I’ve heard several times. The thing is, MRAPs are designed to be counter-IED. We don’t fight with those tactics, so what do we care if other governments have MRAP-type capabilities? In a conflict, it doesn’t much matter if it’s an MRAP or a bicycle, if we hit it with a SMAW, it’s not driving any more.
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