Military's monthly Iraq costs rose during fiscal 2005

The Defense Department says it spent $4.5 billion a month on recurring operational costs in Iraq in fiscal 2005, nearly $300 million more than the average monthly costs the previous year.

Although indicative of how U.S. military personnel and equipment costs have risen as the insurgency in Iraq intensified throughout the year, independent analysts cautioned that this so-called burn rate did not necessarily mean the Bush administration would need substantially more supplemental appropriations from Congress.

The $4.5 billion-a-month cost, which the Pentagon provided in response to an inquiry by CongressDaily, is only a piece of defense spending for the ongoing operations, and does not include more than $1 billion spent each month on procurement and military construction projects, as well as additional funds allocated for intelligence operations in Iraq.

The administration has not yet submitted a request for fiscal 2006 emergency supplemental spending for the military, although Congress last month approved a $50 billion appropriation to pay for contingencies in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere through the early spring.

Some lawmakers have predicted the administration's next military supplemental spending request might be as high as $100 billion -- reflecting as much as a 50 percent increase in the cost of operations over fiscal 2005 levels. Analysts said they were skeptical that the cost of military operations would climb as high as $150 billion in fiscal 2006, and one said he suspected the department would request fiscal 2007 emergency dollars in its next supplemental submission.

"The request might be as high as $100 billion, but that'll be over a two-year split," said Winslow Wheeler, a former Senate Budget Committee analyst who now tracks military spending at the Center for Defense Information. A Pentagon source said there has been some talk within the department about holding back some of the planned fiscal 2006 spending to create a bridge supplemental for early fiscal 2007.

These analysts said they were hesitant to project monthly burn rates for this fiscal year, stating that the uncertainty of operations makes it nearly impossible to predict with accuracy.

"We don't know if the operational tempo is going to go up, down, or stay the same," Wheeler said. "We don't know what the number will be or what the direction of the trend will be."

Steven Kosiak, a defense budget analyst at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, likewise said spending could hinge somewhat on troop levels in the country. "From the very macro level, which is frankly all you can do, I would think [burn rates would be] roughly the same if you have roughly the same troops there," he said.

Decreasing the size of the force deployed to Iraq would eventually substantially decrease burn rates, though there is a cost associated with transferring soldiers out of Iraq, Kosiak added.

Meanwhile, equipment procurement costs related to military operations in Iraq were expected to increase dramatically from $6.4 billion in fiscal 2004 to $19.1 billion in fiscal 2005, according to a Congressional Research Service analysis in October. That included roughly $5 billion to transform Army brigades into smaller, more modular units, $1 billion for military construction projects in Iraq, and money to update equipment used in the field.

The Pentagon did not provide its procurement statistics for fiscal 2005 at presstime.