Andrew Krepinevich, executive director of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, explains "reset costs." These are the costs associated with replacing, repairing and upgrading damaged military equipment. Krepinevich tells Deborah Amos that everything from body armor to helicopters needs repair or replacement.
STEVE INSKEEP, host: This week on MORNING EDITION, we've been talking about what the American military can do in Iraq, and what the war is doing to the American military. Today we'll look at the toll the war is taking on equipment - the helicopters, Humvees, tanks. Repairs are not cheap. The military calls this the reset cost, and Robert Gates said it would be a top priority in his confirmation hearing for secretary of defense.</s>DEBORAH AMOS, host: To find out more, we turn to Andrew Krepinevich; he heads the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments in Washington. Krepinevich says the Army's equipment is taking a beating - damage by enemy fire, the elements, and almost constant use.</s>Mr. ANDREW KREPINEVICH (Executive Director, Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments): As anyone who commutes will know, if you plan on commuting 10 miles each way a day and all of a sudden you're commuting 40 and 50 and 60 miles each way, your car is going to wear out a lot more quickly. Well, the Army had planned to use this equipment in a peacetime basis. Now that it's at war, it's using it much more intensively.</s>Mr. ANDREW KREPINEVICH (Executive Director, Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments): And not only that, you get some modifications to the equipment that also cause problems. So, you know, we see these Hummers on our highways. They have similar vehicles to that over in Iraq. But what they've had to do to provide better protection to the soldiers are to put armor plates on the sides of these Hummers, these Humvees. Well, imagine putting armor plates on the side of your car. You know, what does that do to your tires? What does that do to your transmission? What does that do to your gas mileage? And what you see is this equipment wearing out at an accelerated rate.</s>DEBORAH AMOS, host: So is there a dollar figure, now, on the reset costs?</s>Mr. ANDREW KREPINEVICH (Executive Director, Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments): Yes there is. The Army has requested, and the Congress has approved $17 billion for this fiscal year. So it's the year that begins the first of October through the end of next September. And the Army said that will enable us, for these units that have come back from Iraq whose equipment has been partly destroyed - certainly a lot of it's worn out - to begin to refit those units. It will enable us to make sure that those units that came back, that are about to go back to Iraq again, that we make sure they have a full complement of equipment.</s>DEBORAH AMOS, host: How can you know all of your reset costs when you don't know when the Army is going to leave Iraq? Aren't these rolling costs that come over time?</s>Mr. ANDREW KREPINEVICH (Executive Director, Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments): Well, that's why the Army says, you know, we cannot put this in our budget. We have to look at exactly what is going on in these military operations, the intensity in places like Afghanistan and Iraq. And so it submits these reset costs as they become known.</s>Mr. ANDREW KREPINEVICH (Executive Director, Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments): On the other hand, the Army also does estimates. And so, for example, the Army will tell you, we anticipate that if there is no significant change in the level of operations, in the intensity of operations, that next year our costs will be about $13 billion. So they can give you a ballpark number.</s>DEBORAH AMOS, host: Why can't it be more specific? They've been there for three years, they're beginning to see the patterns of how this equipment is wearing down -and they know about helicopters, tanks, Hummers - so why is this figure so murky?</s>Mr. ANDREW KREPINEVICH (Executive Director, Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments): Well, I think if you just went back - just go back two years, for example. Let's look at 2004 - 2004, in Iraq, started out relatively peacefully, then we had the uprisings in the spring. Since then, things have gotten progressively worse. So for the Army, say in the beginning of 2004 - to be able to accurately predict what kind of fighting it was going to be doing in 2006 is very difficult.</s>Mr. ANDREW KREPINEVICH (Executive Director, Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments): And the same thing applies in Afghanistan. Two years ago, the sense was the Taliban was defeated and now we find that we're engaged in a number of hostile operations with the Taliban forces in Afghanistan. So you can project, but as people in the Pentagon are fond of saying, the enemy gets a vote in this, too.</s>DEBORAH AMOS, host: Is there a moment where the secretary of defense has to start making some tough calls? For example, will some of the Army's modernization programs have to be scrapped to pay for all of this as we go forward?</s>Mr. ANDREW KREPINEVICH (Executive Director, Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments): Well, that's an interesting question. When you talk about resetting the force, do you really want to reset it to the kind of army that existed on the eve of the Second Gulf War? That army was optimized and oriented to fight conventional forces, and yet now we find ourselves fighting irregular forces - terrorists, guerrillas, militias and so on. And so, the question becomes, let's take a look at the Army modernization program. What is in there? And how much of that is really going to help us deal with the kinds of challenges that we confront right now?</s>Mr. ANDREW KREPINEVICH (Executive Director, Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments): And a potential bill payer, if sacrifices have to be made, may be the Army's future combat system. It is the Army's crown jewel, in terms of their modernization effort, but a lot of people - myself included - are concerned that this new system may be primarily oriented towards fighting another Republican Guard somewhere, another enemy tank force. And so the question is, this future combat system program - which is projected to cost $150 billion over its lifespan - is that really something the Army absolutely needs or is this a program that perhaps should be modified to free up funding to be able to do some of the things the Army needs to be able to do right now in terms of things like resetting?</s>DEBORAH AMOS, host: Let's talk about the future: 2006, we're talking about $17 billion. Do reset costs get the U.S. military closer to their goal?</s>Mr. ANDREW KREPINEVICH (Executive Director, Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments): Well, that's a critical question. You know, one of the sobering aspects of this war has been the continued projections of progress just around the corner. And of course, the continued frustration, the sense that Iraq is a more violent place today than it was in 2005, and it was more violent in 2005 than in 2004. And so, at the end of the day, I think a lot of people want an answer to the question of - is this more good money after bad? And do we have a plan? Is it a plan that's likely to produce results? How can we measure results? Because obviously, the patience of the American people is not infinite, and the resources that we have are not infinite.</s>DEBORAH AMOS, host: That was Andrew Krepinevich, who heads the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments in Washington. During our conversation, he made one other point about the Pentagon's so-called reset costs.</s>Mr. ANDREW KREPINEVICH (Executive Director, Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments): People wear out, too. But of course, people can break in a number of different ways - emotionally, mentally, combat stress - but in a volunteer force, they can also refuse to re-enlist, and leave the service. And so, the Army is quite rightly concerned about the readiness and the ability to refit and reset the people as well as the equipment.</s>DEBORAH AMOS, host: As of yesterday, at least 2,906 members of the U.S. military have died since the beginning of the war in Iraq. The military says more than 22,000 service members have been wounded.</s>STEVE INSKEEP, host: And Deb, our conversations continue tomorrow when we'll talk to a former Army chief of staff who says the mission in Iraq is draining the Army's ability to fight elsewhere.</s>Unidentified Man: (Former Army Official): If you take the combat units and take them apart and put them into advisory detachments, there's no reserve to do anything else.</s>STEVE INSKEEP, host: You're not ready for another war.</s>Unidentified Man: You're not ready to go to Korea or whatever, who knows where, the Antarctic or someplace.