In November 2020, Senator Marco Rubio published an article warning that a withdrawal from Afghanistan without proper planning would risk the capture of American weaponry by the Taliban and other forces hostile to the United States.
- One year later, Senator Rubio's fears came to pass when the American-created Afghan National Security Forces disintegrated within days of an aggressive Taliban onslaught. The Taliban celebrated by parading captured American equipment.
In June 2014, ISIS, the Islamic State, captured the northern Iraqi city of Mosul as well as a sizable cache of military weapons the United States had left behind for local allied forces.
- Abandoned equipment as a postscript to disastrous military interventions is a too-often-recurring consequence.
The U.S. left behind an entire military's worth of equipment during its humiliating retreat from Vietnam
- The list of weapons foreshadowed the enemy haul in Afghanistan:
- ground-support fighter-bombers, main battle tanks, hundreds of artillery pieces, 15,000 tons of ammunition, 100 tons of bombs, and multi-million-dollar signals equipment.
The military term describing operations that move equipment and materiel away from an enemy is retrograde
- Between 2008 and 2018, Congress’s investigative arm, the Government Accountability Office, issued multiple reports documenting how poorly DOD had executed such operations
- In 2008, GAO reported that “DOD and the military services have not clearly established roles and responsibilities for managing and executing the retrograde of materiel and equipment from Iraq”
- Ten years later, DOD has not established a strategic policy
- Too much consensus was evident-too many elected and appointed officials agreed to perpetuate this mess
If America wants to avoid losing billions of dollars in abandoned equipment or having to destroy equipment seized by America's enemies, the solution is to stop intervening everywhere.
- In the every-penny-counts arithmetic of household budgets, billions invested domestically would be transformational. In the cavalier calculus of defense economics, billions are a rounding error
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/the-meaning-of-abandoned-equipment/
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