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Equipment sale in Iraq?

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As security improves in Iraq, the next challenge facing the Pentagon is what to do with all the military equipment the US has shipped to Iraq in the past 6 years. The World’s Katy Clark reports.

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LISA MULLINS: I’m Lisa Mullins and this is the World. Defense Secretary Robert Gates was in Baghdad today and he talked about the improved security situation in Iraq. It was amazingly different from his first visit three years ago, that’s when the Iraq insurgency was at its height. This visit was to assess how well US troops are adapting to a non-combat rule, after handing over many security duties to Iraqi troops last month. Secretary Gates is also talking about future weapons sales to the Iraqi government. The World’s Katie Clark has our story.

KATY CLARK: You know Iraq’s a more stable place when the United States is contemplating selling military equipment and supplies to the country, rather than simply handing them over. In fact, Congress has been told of potential arms sales to Iraq worth some $9 billion. Iraq has expressed interest in such things as tanks, armored helicopters and cargo planes. Graham Allison welcomes that prospect. He’s director of the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard.

GRAHAM ALLISON: Since the relationship to date has been one in which basically Americans are spending more than $100 billion a year defending Iraq, the idea that they might actually be buying something has some appeal. [LAUGHS]

KATY: But it’s not just the money. Daniel Goure of the Lexington Institute says Iraq will continue to face security problems, some internal, some external, for a while yet. And the United States should be the one providing the materiel.

DANIEL GOURE: If we have to go back to help Iraq defend itself against some other country in the future, unnamed country, then it would be nice if we’re both flying the same aircraft for example that could use the same bombs, that could use the same spare parts. And that would hold for tanks and trucks and other things as well.

KATY: Defense Secretary Robert Gates said today that he’s assessing what kinds of armaments and how much of them Iraqi security forces would likely need as the US winds down its involvement there.

ROBERT GATES: We are in the process and working out the kinds of equipment we might be able to transfer to the Iraqi security forces, equipment that’s already here, as well as talking about purchases of new equipment by the Iraqis. And we basically will be guided by the requirements that they provide and that we develop in a dialogue with them.

KATY: The United States itself faces the enormous task of moving some 31 million items out of Iraq by the end of 2011. They include 34,000 tons of ammunition and more than 600 aircraft. Some are concerned that the withdrawal from Iraq could temporarily divert much needed assets from the war in Afghanistan. So when then don’t we simply give it all to the Iraqis and be done with it? Anthony Cordesman is the Burke Chair in Strategy at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. He says that’s neither desirable nor practical.

ANTHONY CORDESMAN: You’re talking about billions of dollars worth of inventory, but you’re also talking about a lot of equipment which whatever it cost, has essentially been used up.

KATY: And Cordesman notes that a lot of the military gear and equipment that’s still in usable condition for the city streets and plains of Iraq, isn’t the type of stuff that would be very useful in rugged rural Afghanistan. Take the M-Wrap, a very heavy explosive resistant vehicle.

ANTHONY: It was designed specifically for the conditions in Iraq, so it’s too heavy and it lacks the ability to move through the roads and the hills of Afghanistan for example, and because it’s designed only against one type of explosive, it’s very vulnerable to modern anti-tank guided weapons.

KATY: So look to the next phase of the Iraq war as being a long tedious drawdown, not just of US troops but of mountains of US equipment and supplies.

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