MouthBQ98 said:
I've seen estimates but they are all over the place.
I do know most of our donations to date have been older equipment that was unlikely to be used by us in projected combat scenarios short of an actual WWIIII and consumed maintenance budgets, and were partly older munitions with limited shelf life that are destroyed when they expire anyhow. They are valued at replacement cost on the books but many older systems aren't replaced like for like, but with a different new system already planned and budgeted, so the only "cost" is getting it off the books a few years earlier than it's planned scrapping or destruction.
Now, we have provided some newer gear and newer production runs of ammunition and equipment as things have gone on, and that will require some actual additional budgeting to replace in inventory if it was planned to be available in the future, but not much new aside from personal arms and gear and some ammunition.
There will be some actual inventory replacement cost incurred on our behalf but not actually the billions of dollars that the equipment is valued at, as most of it would be need replacing.
It's confusing as hell and very few are tracking it. This is the only site I've found that attempts to accurately track what's happening:
Kiel Institute. You can download their data set to see actual numbers and pretty detailed information. This has been updated through Jan15.
As of Jan15, the US has spent a total of $74B in Euros or $79B in USD. Our total verbally allocated figure is $100B, so I'm assuming then we've spent 79% of what we've approved, but not 100% if that is accurate:
Financial - $25B
Humanitarian - $4B
Military - $44B
Thus, cash is about 34% of the total and military equipment is 60% of the total.
