# Pentagon shipping massive amount of arms to Iraq and Afghanistan



## phoenyx (Sep 7, 2016)

Found an interesting article on the Center for Public Integrity, winner of the Pulitzer Prize, would like to know what others think of its findings. Here's an excerpt...

**_The Pentagon has spent billions of dollars since 2001 funneling roughly more than a million assault rifles, pistols, shotguns, and machine guns into Iraq and Afghanistan, helping to fuel lasting conflict there, according to a newreport by a London-based nonprofit research and advocacy group Action on Armed Violence.

At least 949,582 of these small arms were given to security forces in Iraq, and at least 503,328 small arms were given to local forces in Afghanistan, the group said. They called this an “under-estimate” based on the information they were able to acquire.

If the figures are correct, the US exports amounted to more than one small arm for each member of Afghanistan’s security forces, which totaled roughly 355,000 soldiers, police, and airmen in February 2015, according to a NATO operational update on the force. The number of armaments sent to Iraq also vastly exceeded the current size of that country’s active military and paramilitaries - 209,000, according to the International Institute for Strategic Studies’ 2016 Military Balance report.

Until now, the Pentagon hasn’t published such a tally of its own, so the group’s researchers spent a year scouring multiple databases to arrive at its estimate: a general Pentagon contract list, a government-wide contracting list, and multiple government reports on military spending. They finally calculated that the overall value of the contractually-agreed small arms shipments, just to those two countries, was roughly $2.16 billion.

U.S. intelligence reports and eyewitnesses have previously said that a significant fraction of the U.S.-financed arms were either lost or stolen, and that many wound up in the hands of forces opposed to US interests, including terrorist groups such as the Islamic State, or ISIS.

In 2007, for example, the General Accountability Office said the coalition forces in Iraq could not account for 190,000 U.S.-supplied weapons. A July 2014  audit by the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction sharply criticized the Pentagon for not paying adequate attention to the fate of weaponry sent to Afghanistan, citing rampant discrepancies in records of gun serial numbers and other problems. In many instances over the past two years, U.S.-advised forces in those two countries have engaged in protracted clashes with terrorists equipped with captured caches of U.S. small arms, as well as U.S. tanks, artillery, and armored personnel carriers._**

Read more at:  The Pentagon has shipped more than a million small arms to Iraq and Afghanistan’s defense forces


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## HereWeGoAgain (Sep 7, 2016)

Barry...nailing down that gun salesman of the decade award with authority!!!


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## Zoom-boing (Sep 7, 2016)

HereWeGoAgain said:


> Barry...nailing down that gun salesman of the decade award with authority!!!



Ah, the first sentence:

_The Pentagon has spent billions of dollars since 2001_

That's government, not just obama


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## HereWeGoAgain (Sep 7, 2016)

Zoom-boing said:


> HereWeGoAgain said:
> 
> 
> > Barry...nailing down that gun salesman of the decade award with authority!!!
> ...



  Well he is the CIC.


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## Zoom-boing (Sep 7, 2016)

HereWeGoAgain said:


> Zoom-boing said:
> 
> 
> > HereWeGoAgain said:
> ...



<sigh>


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## gipper (Sep 7, 2016)

The arms probably got lost...you know?  Like that $6.5 trillion that somehow disappeared.

Pentagon’s Sloppy Bookkeeping Means $6.5 Trillion Can’t Pass an Audit


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## Dreamer (Sep 25, 2016)

ISIS could win a war instead in outside Pershmerga and Syria border. In Iraq if they get down 209,000 Iraqian ground forces to 100,000 then win the war around Baghdad then they can celebration and get Sharia laws like they promise to foreign country. 

Most of ISIS troops come from Europe and Africa. 

Just little kind from middle east. Syria conflict is over with 40,000-60,000 troops for ISIS. 

It's around 65,000 troops in Iraq conflict if I know right.


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## Bleipriester (Sep 27, 2016)

ISIS could not win a war. It is a bunch of a few thousand raiders that were around since 2006 but never able to threaten its neighbors. What we have there is "ISIS", a professional merc army that heavily specializes on terrorist guerrilla warfare and mobility. Same applies for "al-Qaeda". 
Those armies were in the making since 2007, when the US told the world it is going to support extremist al-Qaeda groups like al-Qaeda in Iraq aka Islamic Sate of Iraq aka Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant.

"In the past few months, as the situation in Iraq has deteriorated, the Bush Administration, in both its public diplomacy and its covert operations, has significantly shifted its Middle East strategy. The “redirection,” as some inside the White House have called the new strategy, has brought the United States closer to an open confrontation with Iran and, in parts of the region, propelled it into a widening sectarian conflict between Shiite and Sunni Muslims.

To undermine Iran, which is predominantly Shiite, the Bush Administration has decided, in effect, to reconfigure its priorities in the Middle East. In Lebanon, the Administration has coöperated with Saudi Arabia’s government, which is Sunni, in clandestine operations that are intended to weaken Hezbollah, the Shiite organization that is backed by Iran. The U.S. has also taken part in clandestine operations aimed at Iran and its ally Syria. A by-product of these activities has been the bolstering of Sunni extremist groups that espouse a militant vision of Islam and are hostile to America and sympathetic to Al Qaeda.

One contradictory aspect of the new strategy is that, in Iraq, most of the insurgent violence directed at the American military has come from Sunni forces, and not from Shiites."

The Redirection - The New Yorker


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