We are. There’s one reason I can attest to personally; it was all a lot of crap to begin with.
Meaning: most of the stuff we went to war with was garbage. In 2003, when I was sent to Iraq, we loaded EVERYTHING we had into those shippers, and we had nothing one would call adequate for a functioning unit. All I babysitted the first two years I was in the Army was random shit thrown together, no evidence whatsoever of a team ready for deployment. Remember the chemical weapons threat? I was sent with my training rifle, gas mask and chem suit, and actually wore those torn, unsealable bitches when SCUDs started flying around March 17 or so. I thought I was a dead man when they sounded the gas alarm. But anyway, our combat support hospital was outfitted in Kuwait with slightly better equipment before we made our lonely, eerily quiet trek into post-shock and awe Iraq. It still wasn’t enough. We had two lousy trucks full of hastily grabbed medical supplies-hardly enough for a 128-bed hospital set-up.
What I’m getting at is that the Army probably seized on the opportunity to get rid of all its trash by pushing it into Iraq. That way, when they got home, they would have new shiny toys. Much of the heavy vehicles that we left were aged, scarred by the harsh conditions and held together by genie magic.
Now I don’t know how much of that shit out there now is still serviceable in 2011-after all, that is a good question…how much of that stuff is worth bringing home due to its use/abuse? Because if it’s in the same sorry shape that my shit was in circa 2003, let it rot. It may have been worth billions, but depreciation is a bitch in the desert.