Wars have long been weighed by their expenditure of “blood and treasure”—their human and financial costs. Indeed, Donald Trump has long used the phrase as a metric to judge the wisdom of deploying U.S. forces, dating to his 2013 critiques of the war in Afghanistan. Now Trump has launched his own military operation in which the United States is outspending its opponent by several orders of magnitude. History suggests that a decision point is coming soon: escalate or go home.
Debates over the legality of U.S. military strikes on alleged drug-smuggling boats have obscured calculations of their cost. And while no U.S. casualties have been reported during Operation Southern Spear, which has killed 87 claimed enemy combatants so far, the campaign is consuming far more American treasure than cartel lucre.
On one side of this conflict is Cartel de los Soles, the alleged partnership between drug smugglers and Venezuelan government figures. The DoJ estimates the network is moving cocaine with a street value of between $6.25 billion and $8.75 billion annually, yielding them a net profit of somewhat less.
The Pentagon has released few details about the 23 vessels it has blown up, but one was reported to be a civilian-type 39-foot Flipper-type motorboat with four 200-horsepower engines. A new one retails on Boats.com for $400,000, but the old, open-top motorboats in the videos must cost far less. The crew of the boats have been reported as making $500 per trip.
On the other side of the conflict is certainly the most expansive–and thus most expensive–military deployments in history for a counter-narcotics mission.
The first task force of warships deployed to the operation, which included an Amphibious assault ship and even a nuclear powered attack submarine, cost $19.8 billion to buy. They were later joined by the aircraft carrier Gerald R. Ford, which cost $12.9 billion to buy after $4.7 billion for research and development. Its three escorts pushed the purchase price of the Southern Spear fleet past $40 billion.
This fleet is backed by at least 83 land-based aircraft that have been documented in the deployment so far, collectively worth at least $1.8 billion: ten F-35Bs ($109 million apiece), seven Reaper drones ($33 million each), three P-8 Poseidons ($145 million each), and least one AC-130J gunship ($165 million).
To be sure, these ships and aircraft have been and will be used for many other missions, but this is how that investment is currently being recouped.
That’s just the purchase price. The estimates for every hour of the carrier’s operation is roughly $333,000, while each escort consumes a comparatively cheaper $9,200 per hour.
For the aircraft, the cost per flight hour is roughly $40,000 for the F-35s and the AC-130J; $29,900 for the P-8s; and $3,500 for the Reaper drones.
Then there are the munitions used in the attacks themselves. Analysis of the strike videos show that U.S. forces have fired Hellfire missiles (about $150,000 to $220,000 apiece) AGM-176 Griffins ($127,333 in FY2019 costs), and perhaps GBU-39B Small Diameter Bombs (roughly $40,000 each).
And on the personnel side, there is the pay and benefits for the roughly 15,000 US service members who have been deployed so far in the operation, including 5,000 ashore in Puerto Rico and 2,200 Marines aboard ships.
When you bring these two sides into comparison, a clear asymmetry becomes evident in the numbers of this “armed conflict.”
At the operational level, the cost to acquire the U.S. forces arrayed for Southern Spear is at least seven times the annual revenue of their enemy and at least 5,000 times more than what the enemy paid for the speedboats they are fighting.
At the tactical level, the numbers are even more asymmetric.
The cost of the speedboats destroyed is less than the cost of operating the Ford off Venezuela for a single day. Each of the drones used to kill the boat crews cost roughly 66,000 times as much as each crewman was reportedly paid.
Each bomb and missile cost 80 to 300 times more that the crew’s pay. If U.S. forces used four munitions for each strike—“twice to kill the crew and twice more to sink it,”—that’s 320 to 1200 times the cartel’s cost.
All this illustrates a disparity that has bedeviled America in every conflict we have fought in the modern age, that we have put ourselves in the “awful arithmetic” position of having to spend orders of magnitude more than our foes.
Yet these numbers point not just to a problem for America’s latest “armed conflict” but its potential future. The operations in the Caribbean could soon face the same sustainability problem that surfaced in conflicts from Vietnam to Afghanistan. When the U.S. has to spend orders of magnitude more to neutralize a target than its foe spends to field or replace it, it enters into what businesses call a “losing equation” that often adds up to failure.
This math also suggests the strategies that both sides will pursue. When one side is vastly outspending the other, the weaker but cheaper side realizes that all it has to do is wait.
And when leaders of the high-spending side begin to sense a ticking clock, they usually choose one of two options: evacuate or escalate. They may scramble to find a way to “declare victory and go home,” as the U.S. did in Vietnam and Afghanistan. Or they try to change the math, such as by using the costly assets in some other, usually dramatic, way. The pertinent example here is from 2003, when the perceived “force flow” commitment and then the unsustainable costs of keeping US forces massed on the borders of Iraq helped lead President George W. Bush to pull the trigger on its invasion.
The math may well put President Trump in this same position: to either call costly forces home and declare he’s won this “war”—or decide to turn it into an actual one.
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