Posted BY: Ned Barnett
I thought the Afghanistan bug-out was the ultimate arms deal.
Biden abandoned billions of dollars of weapons, leaving them behind for the Taliban to enjoy. This meant that our military – Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines – were out a lot of weapons and vehicles, aircraft and drones, and God alone knows what else. When you’re in the middle of a bug-out, it’s hard to find the time to go take an inventory of the equipment you’ll never see again. I’ll never know why we didn’t use a little C-4, which we were probably abandoning as well – to render all of those vehicles inoperable (a fancy term that means terminally broken). There must have been an angle.
The actual value of what was left behind was all over the map.
A quick review of recent headlines ranges from a CNN claim that we left behind $7 billion worth of materiel – a lot of money, equipment-wise, for sure. However, FactCheck.org insists that the Republicans “inflated the cost” of what the Taliban seized, claiming that $85 billion is too high an estimate. They came in with a marginally-deflated number, $82.9 billion.
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This is not far from what President Trump said in Alabama on August 22, 2021: “They’ve left $83 billion worth of equipment behind, including brand new Apache helicopters, thousands of Humvee vehicles with armor guard, equipment that nobody has ever even seen before, it was so sophisticated.”
A few days later, Trump expanded on his perspective of the weapons left abandoned.
