The cost to taxpayers of the air war against the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria is approaching $1 billion and would soar even higher if U.S. ground troops are introduced to the fight, according to a study released Monday.
The Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments looked at how much it would cost to fight the Islamist extremist group under President Obama’s current plan to limit U.S. military involvement to air support for local forces in both Iraq and Syria and a small number of advisers in Iraq. The study found it would cost between $200 million and $320 million a month to keep that campaign going at a steady level. With the addition of 25,000 U.S. ground combat troops, the cost would soar to $1.1 billion to $1.8 billion per month.
The study estimates that between $780 million and $930 million has been spent since June on the campaign — which U.S. officials have said can easily be funded within the existing budget.
But Pentagon officials warn that a campaign against the group lasting years — as Obama and other administration officials have warned – would require a rethinking of future defense budgets. This comes on top of what another Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments study estimates is a gap between military readiness and actual funding that is expected to grow to between $200 billion and $300 billion over the next five years in a political climate that’s not favorable to more Pentagon spending.
“When we submitted the budget last year and it went to the White House for approval and it was approved and sent over to Congress, as you know, the Joint Chiefs all said we could accomplish the nation’s security needs with that budget with certain assumptions. One of them was that the number of commitments would either level off or come down. And secondly, that we would get some flexibility in the budget to change paid compensation, healthcare, retire weapons systems and infrastructure,” Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Martin Dempsey said Friday.
“Commitments have gone up. The things that we were looking for in terms of flexibility have only very minimally been delivered. So if you’re asking me do I assess right now, as we go into the fall review for [fiscal 2016] that we’re going to have budget problems? Yes.”
