As so often, I’m assuming the answer has to do with jobs in someone’s Congressional district or $$$ to a key member of the House or Senate…

Well, you know that the market value drops the minute you drive it off the lot. Only the best for our Afghan hosts.

Wait! This makes no sense! In June the Washington Post was reporting on us shredding and selling for scrap tons of those things in Afghanistan. It was in the “News of AfPak” segment of Harry Shearer’s June 23 Le Show:

http://harryshearer.com/le-shows/june-23-2013/

Harry Shearer: The other big news out of there this week was that the official handover of the military operations in Afghanistan from NATO to the Afghan government was completed this week. From now on our troops will only be there to – I guess watch TV. And, the Washington Post reports, facing that tight deadline for all U.S. troops to be out of there and tough terrain, the U.S. military has destroyed more than 170 million pounds worth of vehicles and other military equipment as it rushes to get out of there. The massive disposal effort, which U.S. officials say is unprecedented, has unfolded largely out of sight. See? More confidentiality. There’s an ongoing debate, though, inside the Pentagon about what to do with the heaps of equipment that won’t be returning home. Military planners have determined they will not ship back more than 7 billion dollars’ worth of equipment – about 20 percent of what we have there – because it’s no longer needed or would be too expensive to ship back home. The Pentagon says bequeathing a large share to the Afghan government would be challenging because of complicated rules governing equipment donations to other countries, and concern that Afghanistan’s fledgling forces – Washington Post’s word – would be unable to maintain it. Some gear may be sold or donated to allied nations, but few are likely to be able to retrieve it because it’s still in the war zone. Therefore, much of it will continue to be shredded, cut and crushed to be sold for pennies per pound on the Afghan scrap market. The destruction of tons of equipment is all but certain to raise sharp questions in Afghanistan and the United States about whether the Pentagon’s approach is fiscally responsible. You think? Says Major General Kurt Stein, head of the 1st Sustainment Command, “We’re making history doing what we’re doing here. This is the largest retrograde mission in history.” Unquote.

I found the article: http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/scrapping-equipment-key-to-afghan-drawdown/2013/06/19/9d435258-d83f-11e2-b418-9dfa095e125d_story.html

It goes on to talk specifically about MRAPs:

The most contentious and closely watched part of the effort involves the disposal of Mine-Resistant Ambush Protected vehicles, the hulking beige personnel carriers that the Pentagon raced to build starting in 2007 to counter the threat of roadside bombs in Iraq and Afghanistan. The massive trucks, known as MRAPs, came to symbolize the bloody evolution of wars that were meant to be short conflicts but turned into quagmires.

The Pentagon has determined that it will no longer have use for about 12,300 of its 25,500 MRAPs scattered at bases worldwide, officials said. In Afghanistan, the military has labeled about 2,000 of its roughly 11,000 MRAPs “excess.” About 9,000 will be shipped to the United States and U.S. military bases in Kuwait and elsewhere, but the majority of the unwanted vehicles — which cost about $1 million each — will probably be shredded, officials said, because they are unlikely to find clients willing to come pick them up.

“MRAPs have served us well in the current war, but we will not need all that we bought for Iraq and Afghanistan in the future,” Alan Estevez, the assistant secretary of defense for logistics and materiel readiness, said in a statement. “It is cost prohibitive to retrograde and reset MRAPs that we do not need for the future.”

What’s 2,000 x $1 million? $2 billion? Someone should tell someone?

Anyone who follows me or my blog knows that I’m no fan of how the DoD is prosecuting this war, but in this instance, I’m actually going to step in and say that this move makes sense.

Yes, at first blush these just seem like this year’s MRAP, but they’re not: these are slightly improved versions of the vehicle that (in the Army at least) MPs have been rolling around in for years. So it’s not a brand new vehicle, just an upgrade, like they did with the HMMWVs once upon a time.

The MRAP is the worst possible vehicle for the agile movement required in most of Afghanistan: it was a mistake for the US to purchase them, and an even greater mistake to give them to the Afghans. In this regard the M1117 makes more sense.

Another reason the M1117 makes sense is cost: maintaining and running the MRAP behemoth would be prohibitively expensive for the Afghan military. All indications are that they’re going to struggle with the vehicles they are getting, but the MRAP is very much a 1st world vehicle that’s outside the capabilities of the Afghans to maintain.

What’s troubling is the large number of unarmored vehicles we’re buying for the Afghans in a threat environment still saturated with IEDs. Ranger pickups are no match for what the insurgency keeps putting in the roadways.

So while there are many reasons to criticize US efforts in Afghanistan, this isn’t one of them.

@Jim White: Pretty sure whatever gear we leave behind is going to be idle within 18-24 months after we walk out the door, given ISAF’s lack of focus on a) logistics b) maintenance over the years. It was a conscious decision to bulk up the ANSF’s fighting abilities, but it’s going to mean that they really can’t handle much beyond those basic combat skills long-term.