Numbers are a big deal, but numbers can be misleading or construed to drive you towards a certain conclusion. Afghanistan bombs and troop deployment numbers can be two completely different things to two different people.
For example, a paper by Tim Kane on Hoover.org is titled, “The Decline of American Engagement: Patterns in U.S. Troop Deployments,” shows how troop deployments were highest from around 1950 (Korean War) and 1970 (Vietnam War), and have been on a downward trend ever since.
The very first sentence in the paper is shocking. “The number of U.S. troops deployed has been trending downward over the short and long terms,
and is projected to reach zero before mid-century.” What do you think of a zero (0) number of U.S. overseas troops by year 2050?
However, in the paper, it does say the forecast has a wide margin of error.
Afghanistan Bombs and Dollars
Bombs are a part of war, unfortunately. Also unfortunately, bombs cost a lot money. This isn’t a big deal to the Chicken Hawks. The money to purchase these bombs is taken from citizens, even the ones who don’t believe in dropping bombs on innocent people.
A graph from Statista via The Globalist shows how many bombs have been dropped in Afghanistan from 2004 to 2018. The numbers range from 84 in 2004 to 5,213 in 2018. The 2018 number was only up until September 2018.
The U.S. coalition (which excludes the Afghan Air Force) has dropped 38,418 bombs over the course from 2004 to September 2018.
You can visit the Air Force’s site and see all the numbers for yourself, but for some reason, they quit reporting after February 2020.
According to The Drive, the cost of bombs has a big range as well. From a guided bomb of $220,916 to a “dumb” bomb of $4,000, there is no shortage of money in purchasing these destructive weapons.
If, by chance, only the $4,000 variants were dropped, that means from 2004 to September 2018, the U.S. Coalition has spent at least $153,672,000 alone on bombs. This doesn’t include the cost of transporting the bombs to Afghanistan, the cost of the sorties to drop those bombs, the cost of housing the bombs, and every other cost from purchasing to dropping of the bomb.
Sortie definition: “one mission or attack by a single plane”
Deployment Numbers
1983: 517,519
1991: 447,572
2002: 230,484
Total Troops Deployed in 2017: 199,485
Total Troops Deployed in 2020: 171,025 (Except Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syria, in which the Pentagon has stopped publishing numbers)
Some articles showing numbers in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syria:
Total Troops in Iraq in August 2020: Approximately 5,200
Troops in Afghanistan in June 2020: Approximately 8,600
Total Troops in Syria: Approximately 500
Estimated 2020 Deployed: 185,325
What Does All this Mean?
Trump can pull out troops, but nowadays, technology can replace the troops. During the Korean War, troops needed to be there to get the job done. In today’s world, drones can do the work of many soldiers.
The 1,323,000 civilian employees and contractor employed by the Department of Defense (as of April 2018) aren’t even mentioned in this article as well. And how about the IRR numbers they can pull at any time? What about missiles? Those cost money too!
Don’t let the lower number of troops fool you.
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