Trying to figure out how much the U.S. spends on joint military exercises with South Korea is sort of like calculating the cost of a Super Bowl flyover.
If you tally all the expenses, including pilot pay and prorated maintenance for the jets, it could total $450,000.
Or could be more like $100,000, if you count just the cost of the fuel.
Or if you were going to fly the jets anyway, you might decide it doesn’t really cost anything because it’s already paid for in the budget.
President Trump says by canceling so-called “war games” with South Korea, the U.S. will save a “fortune.”
“I hated them from the day I came in. I said, ‘Why aren’t we being reimbursed?’” Trump said Friday speaking to reporters on the White House lawn.
“We pay millions and millions of dollars for planes and all of this,” he said. “It costs us a lot of money. I saved a lot of money. That’s a good thing for us.”
But ask the Pentagon how much the joint exercises cost, and more to the point how much is saved by canceling them, and the answer is a firm, “We don’t know.”
“The costs of the exercises are being reviewed,” said Lt. Col. Christopher Logan, a Pentagon spokesman. “We’re working on it. I don’t have an answer for you.”
It turns out it’s not so easy to figure out the cost of a major exercise. And if you are trying to calculate the savings from not conducting a particular drill, then you have to separate the fixed costs from the incremental costs.
For instance, it cost the U.S. Navy on average about $1 million a day to operate an aircraft carrier.
So, if an aircraft carrier is part of your exercise for 10 days, does that cost $10 million?
Not really, because the carrier would still be operating even it were not taking part in a war game.
But there are extra costs involved in any particular exercise, including fuel for planes, ships, and tanks; ammunition for live-fire exercise; the cost of moving troops around; as well as planning, logistics, and coordination with other countries.
However, if large-scale exercises are simply replaced with lower-profile routine training, it becomes even harder to figure out how much of the training budget is actually being saved.
Not to mention that a major focus of Trump’s massive military build-up was to pay for more training, not less.
“Fish gotta swim, birds gotta fly, and troops gotta train,” quipped one military officer. “We’re always training. It’s what we do.”
Trump cited the cost of flying long-range U.S. bombers from Guam to take part in drills on the Korean Peninsula, a flight that Trump noted takes about 6 1/2 hours.
“I know a lot about airplanes, it’s very expensive. And I didn’t like it,” he said, explaining his decision to scrap the routine missions.
But whether B-52s at Minot Air Force Base in North Dakota or B-2s at Whiteman Air Force in Missouri, the U.S. strategic bomber force regularly flies training missions of eight or more hours at a time.
So, if the bombers on Guam don’t fly to Korea, they’ll just have to fly somewhere else in order to maintain pilot proficiency.
In fact, lack of sufficient flying hours, caused by budget caps over the past few years, is one of the factors suspected of contributing to recent aviation accidents.
But Trump insists the regular training missions in Korea are just a huge waste of money.
“You know, we’re spending a fortune, every couple of months we’re doing war games with South Korea,” Trump said in an interview with ABC. “We’re flying planes in from Guam. We’re bombing empty mountains for practice. I said, ‘I want to stop that and I will stop that.’”
And then he asked the question that the Pentagon can’t yet answer, “What’s this costing?”
