Jessica Schulberg reads a new report that attempts to tally the cost of the ISIS war so far:
Due to the vaguely defined scope of the conflict—President Barack Obama has vowed not to deploy U.S. combat troops—it has been hard to put a dollar amount on the operation. But a Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments (CSBA) report released Monday estimates that the U.S. has already spent between $780-$930 million in Iraq and Syria. In just the past month, the cost was $250-$400 million, or $9-$14 million per day. …
Because Obama has yet outline any long-term plan for U.S. efforts in Iraq and Syria, CSBA’s long-term cost estimates are based on likely hypothetical levels of warfare. If the U.S. draws down airstrikes to approximately 100 targets a month (there have been 200 targets this month, but air campaigns usually peak early because targets learn to hide) and caps U.S. personnel at 2,000, the cost is estimated to be between $2.4 and $3.8 billion a year. But if the administration follows recommendations to deploy 25,000 ground forces and raises the number of air strikes to 200 a month, it will be closer to $13-$22 billion annually.
“To put this in perspective,” she adds, “the U.S. spent approximately $1.1 billion in total direct expenditures in the 2011 NATO-led intervention in Libya.” But notes that these estimates are “far less than the roughly $150 billion the U.S. spent during the peak years of the Afghan (2011) and Iraq (2008) wars.” Business Insider looks at where the money to fight ISIS is coming from:
The Pentagon has said that financing for the ISIS fight will come from the Overseas Contingency Operation fund, an account exempt from budget caps that was created for the wars in both Afghanistan and Iraq last decade.
Earlier this year, Obama sought to dwindle the budget for that account down to about $59 billion from $85 billion, reflecting the decline of operations in Afghanistan. But the spending bill passed by Congress last month continues to fund the OCO at the $85 billion level.
Meanwhile, Kate Brannen tries to see through the fog over the $5 billion counterterrorism fund the White House proposed in June, including the $500 million Congress has already approved to arm the Syrian rebels:
According to multiple sources — both inside the military and on Capitol Hill — the fund’s purpose is murky because it was mostly conceived by National Security Council staff within the White House with little input from budget or policy experts at either the Pentagon or Foggy Bottom. A few days after the West Point speech, while visiting Poland, Obama announced another new fund. This one was $1 billion for a European Reassurance Initiative, again taking Pentagon officials by surprise, Defense Department and congressional sources told Foreign Policy.
In both instances, the Pentagon was given pots of money and was basically told to figure out how to spend the money, rather than asked what it really needed, one Pentagon official said. If the Pentagon had proposed the counterterrorism fund, it would have been “dead on arrival” at the White House, a former senior Defense Department official said.
The Dish 