WASHINGTON, May 12 (UPI) -- The Pentagon has spent $128 billion on the war in Iraq, and Congress' approval of another war supplemental this week will bring that total to around $184 billion, according to Department of Defense officials.
Since 2001 Congress has provided about $350 billion for costs associated with national security in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
Beginning in 2003 with the Iraq war, the Pentagon has received four wartime supplementals -- money appropriated beyond the Pentagon's annual budget.
In March 2003 the White House requested $78 billion, $53 billion of which was earmarked for the Iraq war. In September 2003 President George W. Bush requested another $87 billion, $51.5 billion of which was earmarked for Operation Iraqi Freedom. The war in Afghanistan got $10.5 billion of that amount, and reconstruction efforts in Iraq got $18.6 billion.
The Pentagon declined to ask for another supplemental prior to the 2004 presidential election, despite the ongoing war. Congress added about $25 billion to its coffers in September 2004 to cover the immediate needs of the military during the war.
The White House submitted the latest supplemental request in February -- $81 billion. Of that, roughly $75 billion was earmarked for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. About $56.2 billion was specifically set aside for the Iraq war and $11.8 billion for the Afghanistan operations. Included in the money was some $17 billion for the Army and the Marine Corps to recruit more troops and buy equipment to replace what was destroyed or worn out in the war.
Straight war costs associated with Iraq total $185.7 billion. Adding in the Army equipment costs and reconstruction funding in Iraq, the total comes to $221.3 billion.
The Afghan war has cost $43 billion so far, not including the $11 billion included in the latest supplemental.
The monthly "burn rate" for Iraq is about $4.8 billion. For Afghanistan the military spends about $700 million a month.
Combined with "emergency supplementals" for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Pentagon's annual budget has increased by 41 percent since 2001, Defense Department comptroller Tina Jonas said in February.
The White House's early projections for the cost of the war and its aftermath were around $50 billion. On Sept. 15, 2002, in an interview with a newspaper, White House economic adviser Lawrence Lindsay estimated the war would be about 1 to 2 percent of the gross national product, or about $200 billion on the high end. Lindsey left the White House post several months later.
Office of Management and Budget Director Mitch Daniels called Lindsay's estimate "very, very high" and told news organizations the cost would likely be between $50 billion and $60 billion.
Just weeks before the war, White House spokesman Ari Fleisher told reporters that Iraq would be able to "shoulder much of the burden" of reconstruction because of its oil wealth.
Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz told Congress a month into the war something similar: "We're dealing with a country that can really finance its own reconstruction, and relatively soon."
Those officials did not figure on the dilapidated infrastructure of Iraq after years of war and sanction and a despotic dictator or on the insurgency that makes repairing it so difficult and costly.
The United States maintains around 140,000 troops in Iraq and 20,000 in Afghanistan, though the numbers fluctuate.
The military expects to maintain about that number in Iraq through at least December 2005, according to senior military officials. If the security situation improves -- violence is spiking with more than 300 civilians killed in car-bomb attacks in the last two weeks -- the number of troops will be drawn down.
The war has claimed 1,607 U.S. military lives, according to the Pentagon's most recent statistics. Of those, 1,229 were killed in action -- all but 109 after President Bush declared an end to major combat operations in May 2003.
Since the end of the war, Iraq has had popular elections and is slowly standing up a central government, which will oversee the writing of a new constitution. That document is supposed to be completed this fall, and an election is to follow in December. There is a six-month grace period built into those deadlines.
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